


Cross This Country

by buscemies



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, First Meeting, First Time, Flashbacks, Jealousy, M/M, Prequel, Sexual Content, a lot of travelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-06-05 23:26:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6727657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buscemies/pseuds/buscemies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trevor is nothing if not sincere, and Michael is usually anything but. </p><p>Pre-Ludendorff snatches/stories, out of chronological order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Breakfast at Midnight

Michael . Winter 1986

Trevor says it all the fucking time and Michael can’t seem to get the hell away from it. To the stripper at the club, to the getaway driver, to this sad liquor store owner who offers his wallet with the till's contents - even if he screams it viciously. It seems like he says it to everyone, absolutely everyone.

Well almost.

They're working their way across some bigger liquor stores in the piss-end east of North Yankton that it finally get's at him. 

‘Alright sugar, you want anything else to go with those pancakes?’ the waitress asks Trevor from under a halo of light hair. She has pink lips and brown eyes and might have just been the girl next door five, six years ago.

Michael sighs gruffly and shoves a fat forkful of eggs into his mouth. He fucking hates breakfast food, but this was the only place open, and they're both too hungry to care. The fluorescent light above him keeps buzzing, the surfaces glinting with sterile disuse, the booths something out of Michael's high school days that feels nightmarish now. Trevor reaches out, a hand grazing the waitress' chin gently. Michael isn't sure his seen Trevor touch anything with that much softness before. It catches him off guard; the way it makes his stomach dive a little.

He eats and eats and downs his coffee so he won't catch the next part of their conversation. The robber looks like a boy with a lovely, wide-eyed crush on his middle school teacher, or some high-school hero sweet-talking a girl his been watching across the track and field. The usually manic expression of his face has softened, and his scarred lip is a charming quirk instead of warning sign.

Michael rubs his eyes, glances at the girl who seems to be looking through some rose-tinted glass at the bank robber, the killer. 

Trevor finally withdraws his hand, but his other snakes to her upper hip to maintain contact. It takes her by surprise but she adjusts her feet and her smile comes back a bit fuller, face flushed. She doesn’t seem to remember Michael is sitting close enough to smell her cheap playboy perfume.

Michael scrubs at his face wearily.

They’ve been on the road for almost six months now, and its been a year since Trevor put that flair into that guy’s eye socket. Despite his best efforts there is no one Michael can say he knows better than the fucking maniac sitting across from him. No one he trusts more. But Trevor is careless; brazenly claps him on the shoulder after robberies, winks at him from across the bar or the strip walk, and steals his shirts whenever his own run out. His sure his never had a friend like Trevor, but friends are fucking liabilities as far Michael's concerned. 

The waitress throws a quick look over her shoulder to make sure her manager or the other girl on shift aren’t looking. She lays a hand on Trevor’s shoulder.

‘So sweetheart, you gotta a name?’ Trevor’s voice is hitched low and it shits on what good mood Michael has left after last night’s hold-up. Trevor never fucking does this, it’s usually Michael talking nice and deep to girls in diners and bars and where the fuck-ever. Not T. 

‘Ruby,’ she answers, lips kissing the air on the first letter.

Michael snorts.

Trevor’s eyes flicker to him, and the corner of his mouth turns up in a smirk. He doesn’t tear down the table to punch out Michael. Nothing so chivalrous.

‘What a gorgeous name,’ Trevor smiles and talks brazenly loudly. ‘God I think I love ya already.’

The girl blushes an even prettier hue of pink. In turn, Michael feels himself turning a particular ripe shade of fucking beet.

 _Love_ this, _love_ motherfucking that. Trevor gives it freely, says he loves strangers all the time and usually it would be funny, or stupid or plain fucking embarrassing. But within only six months on the road with Trevor, Michael has learnt that he is nothing if he isn't sincere. Wild, manic, an addict, lost, clever - all those descriptors fly out in the face of "sincere" when it comes to Trevor.

So Michael never doubts that Trevor fucking Phillips falls in love, however briefly - at least twice a shitty week in, week out.

‘…well honey, I would, but see my buddy and I are on the road and we gotta keep moving.’

‘I’m sure he don’t mind me stealing you for a night, huh?’ Michael feels eyes on him, and the anger building behind his shoulders, in his fists on the table floods to the back of his throat. He looks at the waitress, her pretty colours and candy-yellow uniform. Any other fucking night he would already be behind this diner, the waitress’ - Ruby’s - skirts hitched down her thighs and Trevor would be getting high and pissing off and not saying that fucking phrase again. Any other-

‘Yeah Mikey, you don’t mind, do you?’ Trevor’s voice cuts through like diamond on glass.

Michael swallows. For a second he scrambles for something casual enough, or shitty enough. It hits him like a silver bullet and he feels a small grin fight to his lips, 'I don’t know T, I got an awfully long, long way south to go by tomorrow morning.’

Finally, finally Trevor’s eyes flit, and lock onto his. Michael keeps his gaze, slides a foot between Trevor's boots. The moment spins out around them, webs of tension building higher and higher blocking out the screaming fluorescent lights. 

Three seconds in and they have a fucking stand-off on their hands. Michael just wants to get the fuck out of there, but he isn’t sure how the coin’s gonna land once they’re back at the hotel. Come to think of it he doesn't even really understand what the fuck his just gotten himself into. It's not real, he thinks as he stares Trevor down, this place is just fucking annoying, and they have a job planned for tomorrow so they need rest. So it's all just a fucking ruse to move Trevor who he knows looks at him too closely, touches him too often, says his name in too many different ways. It's a fucking con.

Trevor looks away first, Michael pulls his foot back to his side of the booth at the same time.

The conversation between the two starts up around him again, but he ignores it this time, suddenly too tired to keep a vested interest. 

He finishes of his coffee, looks at the snow whipping away by the windows. 

‘…don’t worry about a thing, we're always on the move, I'll come back around,' Michael hears Trevor crooning when he sees him wave in his direction. 

She makes a low whining noise and whispers in his ear, then moves away with a few sways of her waist.

Trevor kicks his shin, hard. Michael shoots to his feet and has two handfuls of his collar before he can think it through. One moment it's the swirling snow and the next its Trevor's warm eyes, and a mouth far too close for comfort. Michael tightens his grip enough to hurt, punishing Trevor for his own thoughts. 

‘What the fuck do you want?’ he hisses, jaw hurting from all the clenching it's been doing.

Trevor takes his time answering with a broad smirk on his face. ‘Hate to disrupt this fine dining experience, Mikey, but you got places to be.'

A beat of silence passes in which Trevor's eyes flicker down to his lips, and his eyes darken. 

‘You’d fucking like,’ Michael growls, shucks him back and clears the booth without looking back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! I plan on this being pre-Ludendorf snatches, not sure how many I might do or if I might diverge the last part(s) into an AU...  
> Also, please forgive any errors I do not as yet have a beta reader, feel free to let me know if you see any. 
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading! Feel free to shoot me a review with any comments, critiques or ideas.


	2. Home Free

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small warning: Michael's dad is abusive and shitty in the first half of this chapter.

Michael . Summer 1985

It doesn’t quite make sense, the lights die with his father's shout and Michael loses his bearings in the dark. Everything falls into chaos, a punch grips the side of his jaw,hurls him back. Michael lands with a thump, his left eye wide and his right one bleeding onto his cheek, which he knows because he can feel it, taste it. 

‘What you say to me, boy?’ the voice is hardly the main aggressor, when another fist rips into his side.

Then a low, hollow sobbing rises in tandem with the storm outside, arches beautifully, lands in his gut beside the punch. Michael can hardly stand it any more than he can the following three left, right, left hooks. 

Before the fourth, he finds his footing, the world ripping itself into halves and screaming into slow motion. Finally, finally he dodges the fifth and it shoots into the thin linoleum of the wall behind him. A growl follows, some respite from the slaughter, and Michael feels the wall behind him; slides left until something like a door handle catches his palm. 

Without a second thought he shoves it down and with his elbow leans down enough that the ratty door gives. For a long second his curving backward, rain catching in his open mouth and eye, thunder illuminating an blurry vision of the trailer-park, upside-down and smeared. Michael hits the three stairs down and slides, grovels further into the mud as massive footsteps follow.

Mother, father, blood and bones, sweat and tears. Every fucking part of himself he ever wanted to kill splayed out before him. 

He throws up in the mud, hot and heavy. It splatters across his hands, specks his forearms, but its confused with the mud up to his pits. Michael tastes copper and grit, lifts to his haunches like a track runner. 

A hand, a slippery vice of a thing, closes around his bicep just as his about to bolt. Both forces, back and forward rip at the same time and he feels his shoulder give a sweet pop as its wrenched backward. It feels like shards of glass are jammed all round the socket, the pain making everything tilt on a harsh angle for a couple of seconds. 

But his got more in him that;  Michael knows then, he just knows he needs to leave, one last time and that’ll be it. Home-free. His so adamant about it, he’d leave his left arm the fuck behind if he has to. So he pulls with all his power like a bull in front of a plow, and falls forward again. One foot catches his weight and his flying across the mud. 

Another shard of lightening reflects the trailer park, the few homes scattered across a dead patch, weeds, broken bottles and pick-up trucks. He clears Mrs. Port’s old TV set, who used to give him cookies when he was younger, and then slides across Clive Robbin’s rusty truck, who sold him a BB gun for four bucks back in ’79. Then Michael is gone, down the road, feet sliding across the asphalt. He sticks his left hand in his pants so his shoulder won’t flail so goddamn much. 

He feels the gun tucked in the back of his pants too, cold and with the safety on. Its a perfect reminder of why you take a full fucking measure instead of a half. 

The image of busting a bullet into his old man’s skill pushes him into town by morning. 

* * *

Michael wakes up to the feeling of something poking his side.

‘Oi kid!’ someone is saying in rapid succession. 

Five more sticks let him know its the old post-man, cane in hand. ‘You can’t go the fuck to sleep on public property.’

Two more jabs. His in a phone booth, feet out in front of him and sticking clean out the doors. The handset is swinging gently next to his head. He can't remember how he got there, but he knows why. 

His left hand is still in his pants. The old man sees it. 

‘And public indecency!’ the man stabs his stick into Michael’s shoulder. He screams blindly, everything jarring and spinning. The man screams twice as loud. ‘Public indecency you fuck! Get outta here! Now!’ 

Eyes streaming tears, he finally stands and stumbles out of reach, looking across the innocuous street. All the stores he grew up pick-pocketing sit quaint with their coloured roofs and colour-coded stalls behind glass. The sun is coming up hot and just about all the wetness from the last night has dried, except his clothes which stick and his shoes squelch with every step. A car cruises with a low chortle in a parallel street, a bird squawks on a tree. 

Michael leans by the grocer’s back wall and with his good hand pulls out his smokes and light from his jacket’s breast pocket. He smokes half the pack, watching the post-man deliver envelopes all the way out of sight. He retraces his steps across the street. This time he shuts the door behind him in the phone booth and dials the number he had passed out trying to call the previous night. 

‘Ye-llow?’ Trevor sing-songs, and then, ‘If this is about the gasoline, you have to hold it real close.’

Michael takes a deep, whistling breath, presses the handset to his ear. He can’t fucking believe this is who he has. Trevor. No one else he could possibly call, could trust enough to call, but Trevor Philips in this entire fucking country, world. 

‘Alright, who the fuck is this? Some punk kid huh? One of those prank things? You want me to COME OVER THERE AND -’

'Trevor, T, it’s me,’ he finally says before he get’s a bright earful of threats. 

‘Michael? Shit, what were you practicing what to say? You gotta open that pretty little mouth and use that silver tongue when ya call people,’ Trevor drawls, voice already calmer. 

Michael thanks whatever the fuck sits where-ever and decides these things that Trevor even answered the shitty motel phone.

‘Look, T, I know Lester, you and I said let’s break for the summer, but I…’ another coin his fed the phone tips into its metal belly. Michael puts in his last quarter. ‘I got into some shit, come get me and we’ll maybe hit up a couple more places instead of this hai-fuckign-tus bullshit...I’m bored.’

His shoulder sears, another coin drops. Michael bites his lip to stop the gasp of pain leaving him, tells himself to pull it fucking together, not let up what really happened. Hell, he’ll say he got mugged if he has to; not beaten by his daddy when he went back to visit his mother. Trevor is silent for a second. ‘The hell happened, M?’

‘Nothin’. Look - fuck. T. I need a ride, alright,’ Michael hisses, eyes swimming with the pain again. ‘I need _you_ to give me a ride, alright?’ 

‘Where the hell are ya Michael?’ there it is; his mad-edged voice, like his pissed off now. Michael wonders if his interrupted a fantastic, burgeoning day of meth and tits for him. He feels a flood of embarrassment for needing someone to pull him out his own shit. 

‘Montana, Turner,’ he says, refuses to call it anything but; it ain’t anything else to him now, sure as fuck ain’t home. 

‘Alrighty then,’ Trevor answers, there is clattering in the background, Michael kind of hopes he isn't filling his pipe, doesn’t fuck around getting here, because he’ll be one arm short by then. The final coin drops and few bleeps punctuate the brief pause. ‘The robber get robbed, huh sugartits?’ 

Just like that, he sounds lighter again. Michael leans his head against the phone booth's glass. ‘Somethin’ like that. Now can you get the fuck here, please.’

‘Sure thing Mikey. Soon as I -’ the line goes dead with a final tone. 

He breathes in through his nose, out his mouth. With his last ounce of energy he hauls himself to the bus stop at the end of Main Street and sits down for the long wait. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> Update: couldn't really see an interesting continuation so going to go on to a new chapter and ficlet. Leave a comment or kudos, let me what you thought.


	3. Meet Cute

Trevor .  Spring 1985  


It was a beat up old beagle, yellow and chipped. Made sounds like it was going to burst into flame every time he leaned on the stick up the runway. In the sky at a suicidal altitudes, Trevor had taken a liking to its rattling windows and dented bulkhead. 

Over the past few months and in between his short cargo runs he had taken it upon himself to paint it a scrappy red, and now it sat like clotted shades of blood. He lay on the ground beside it, staring up at the evening sky, dusk muddied above his head and unwilling to reveal any stars.

He’d met Michael five minutes later. Like some fucking film, a bolt of lightening to the desert floor. Two jeeps shredded closer and closer, only one with its headlights staring ahead like an angry bull. The other remained dark, bouncing and hopping nearer, first skirting the edge of the the dirt road and then tearing its curves viciously.

It may very well have been a change in fucking plans, but that was usually unlikely. These things were quiet; some jackass would get off and help him load the cargo, and then drive away just as he flew it back south.

A smile crept onto his face. This, this was finally fucking exciting.

The car with the lights swerved to a stop, its back wheel shot out by the other driver following closer behind. A man, tall, but stockily built fell from the door, landing a few meters away and then ripping toward Trevor at full speed, his face wholly unimpressed and annoyed, like being shot at and chased by some maniac was a minor inconvenience.

Years and years from that instance, lying in whatever back alley, city crease or patch of wilderness Trevor would recall his impression of Michael Townley. Dark hair falling into his face, mouth thin and his jaw a perfect tangent parenthesised by his arched eyebrows. The dying streams of sun caught his light eyes and Trevor felt like he was looking at some fucking poster, some bullshit film or cliché hero with his back against a two cent villain.

The stupidest part of it all was that for the first time that bullshit appealed to him.

His stomach wrenched as in the first pull of meth or blood gushing onto his forearms, a skull under his boot, even though his young self couldn’t recognise it for what it was at the time. 

Hurriedly he climbed onto the wing, the Beagle swinging to his side in protest and creaking when he leaned in and fished out the flair gun. Some half-cooked idea was occurring to him, and as soon as his hand closed around the orange gun it was ready. He jumped to the ground just as the young guy reached him, mouth opening as if to say something, but keeping his silence when he saw what Trevor was holding.

The guy straggling behind was blonde and scraggly, mouth yawning in a scream to show black teeth, his left hand waving a small pistol. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five though.

Trevor’s arm shot out, the flare pointed steadily and without a second thought. He imagined the beautiful light and the firm kickback into his hand a dozen times before he squeezed the trigger.

With the stranger’s breath in his ears and the staring into the madman’s wild eyes he executed the perfect act. The flare flew a hasty, twisting blue line, but driving stranger’s face. He didn’t fall until the smoke had cleared, the inside of his skull lighting up like a lampshade and teeth rattling against one another as if his brain was being scrambled.

‘Fucking ‘A,’ the young man said hoarsely, coming to stand beside him. He had a frown on his face like he was maybe thinking through some problem and carded back his thick, dark hair.

Trevor licked his lips, ’Friend of your’s?’ he asked, rigging up an eyebrow and leaning his hands against his hips. 

‘Friend’s a big word,’ the young guy shrugged, now chewing on his lip.

Trevor found himself grinning at him, as the man watched the eyeball fizzle and drip onto the man’s cheek. His voice had been rough-cut, but precise. Although his accent pinned him to a mid-western trailer park in Trevor’s mind, it also reminded him of some hot-shot gangster. A fucking _wise-guy_. A devil tongued bastard shooting up scores and wearing rings on both hands so it broke the faces of people he punched.

This guy, he thought, was something beyond this cargo, or anything he had ever seen, and all he could think was he wanted _more._

 

* * *

Michael

Michael wasn’t thinking quite clearly, didn’t have his head on his shoulder’s until he looked to see the wild looking guy grinning back. He had teeth like a fucking predator, pearly white, and thick lips that stretched wide. When it struck him that he had just watched him kill a man, it made his heart pound and twist and smack against his ribs.

‘Michael Townley,’ he said by way of introducing himself, holding out a hand, and having it taken by a scarred one, tattooed with a classic _fuck_ and paired on his other hand with only what Michael could imagine was _you!_

Michael wrangled a smirk into a grimace.

‘Trevor,’ his hand was dry and warm from the flair gun.

‘Thanks for that, that asshole had been following me for miles,’ he forced his eyes away and broke the handshake, wiped his frozen nose with the back of a hand.

‘Glad to, now where the hell is the cargo, Michael Townley. Can’t take off in that shit-stain in the dark,’ he jerked a thumb toward the setting sun. ‘And we’ll need to take him too, can’t leave old pop-eye laying here.’

Michael could smell the charred flesh and burst veins where he stood though he didn’t particularly fancy spending a couple of hours in a cockpit with it. But he tightened his mouth and shrugged.

‘I’ll get the cargo, you take care of your handy work.’

Soon, but not soon enough they were in the plane, the body stashed on top of the black duffles in the back, dripping blood and scum onto the floor. Where he sat, he was so tempted to take a sleeve to his nose to stop the scent, but that was a fucking pussy move in front of a guy that had put a flare gun into a stranger’s eye. 

So Michael sat there with his seizing stomach and warmed his hands by rubbing them together as they approached the border. 

Casually, the man wiped his nose on a sleeve then returned his hand to the stick before glancing over, ‘Been doing this long?’ 

The question was rote, but the tone, the simplicity caught Michael off guard; like Trevor was asking if he had been at the accounting firm for long, or how long he’d been jogging in the mornings. It was the sort of shit you expected across white picket fences on Sunday mornings, a phenomenon he'd witnessed on day-time cable. 

Michael cleared his throat. ‘Cargo and small takes for about a year, did a little time. Doing cargo again while I'm on parole.’

Trevor seems to consider it carefully, eyes back on the sky, the plane low enough that its belly would touch the withered trees on the dead stretch of landscapes if they sunk another foot. They gained some altitude when a town crept into view, but the pilot still said nothing.

‘What about you?’ Michael finally asked.

‘Moi?’ came a question, sauntering and theatrical as Trevor struck a hand against his chest. With another sniff he settled into gruff nonchalance. The smell of melted skin was probably getting to him too. ‘Cargo this entire time, held up some small shops in nobody towns on the side,’ he said. 

Michael rose an eyebrow, he had expected something tougher; like maybe the guy had done two years of time and looked barely twenty. Or at least ferocious up-talk of murder, highway stick ups and some fevered retelling of glories. But it all seemed straight forward, honesty in a crook’s mouth. 

‘You killed before?’ he asked, hoping he sounded confident enough that the pilot wouldn’t really dare ask it back.

Trevor snorted loudly, louder than the plane’s rattling. ‘Nothing substantial. Gotta say that was fucking exciting, some kinda kick, my friend.’

Something about the way he said it, something in his words and something in his smile drew a cold line of fear across Michael’s thoughts. ‘I ain’t your friend.’

Trevor shrugged, arched an eyebrow. ‘Not too fussed. Friend’s a big word.’

Hearing his own words shot back at him, Michael took to staring away with as much concentration as he could gather whilst Trevor took up whistling _Oh Canada_  painfully slowly. But even as they skimmed over a dead town, Michael couldn't help grinning a little.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, let me know what you thought, or if there is anything you want to see in the next chapters (open to ideas/prompts tbh)
> 
> Also I decided on a ten chapter fic.


	4. When to Fold Pt. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Graphic-ish violence, but also Trevor and Michael being badass, so...

Michael . Fall 1993

The closer it gets to midnight, the more dangerous this game of cat and mouse gets. That much is obvious even to Lester whose only ever known cork-board plans and his bloodless 20% cut. For once it seems like Trevor sitting to his right is the one not in on it. As the night grows more tense he seamlessly shuffles, deals and knocks back beers; the only sign of his understanding is the growing storm in his eyes. Then again that can be chalked up to the beer not being to his taste. 

Still, with his seventh he smacks table, belches. It sets Michael on edge like a line of blow, his hand twitches as he stifles the urge to reach for his Colt under the table. Smoke curls around them; both their rivals are on their third Cuban cigars, and his own chewed out first in the ashtray next to an entire pack he has been tearing through the past hour or so. They’re hulking pieces of shit, these so-called Carr brothers; the latest in the line of endless potholes their jobs seem to be running into this past year.

Around them, the medium city of Misbek honks in dimmed cars, and plays on the foggy balcony door with neon reds and half-hearted blues. They’re too close to downtown for Michael’s liking. There’s probably even a cop nest not three blocks away. 

Despite all that, Michael keeps it under control, brushes lint from his suit cuff and runs a hand through his hair casually, setting his steeled sight on Lou Carr; the smarter of the two bandit brothers. Michael attracts all the attention he can with his cards, then the table, the chips, his cigarettes. 

Anything. 

Anything but Trevor’s eyes that seem to get darker despite his easy calls and friendly folds.

Anything but Lester breath rattling like a radiator to his left.

The brothers owe them the extra fourth of the last bank job they’ve been holding onto for a week too long. Usually it would smell too much like a trap and they would all be three states away, that fourth be damned, but not when that one-fourth happens to be a solid million in diamonds. Certain-fuckin'-ly not when Michael’s got three mouths to feed and keep smiling eastward of this very border if his going to hold onto the tenacious fucking strings of his fucked up life.

So Michael keeps up the tempo of the game and flicks down a chip, then Lester does.  
  
The unspoken chase stops with the slower Carr. 

‘Look. Gentlemen,’ he says. ‘I got a feeling it’s time to call the real bluff here.’

Just as Lou opens his mouth and looks like his about to say something, Trevor jumps to his feet. Everyone tenses, hands flying to holsters and sheathes and goddamn pitchforks for all Michael can tell in the dingy room; its so fucking fogged with cigarette smoke he can hardly stop squinting. In any case it's a false alarm, for now. Trevor’s got two empty hands in the air, and it makes Michael’s head swim with relief momentarily. 

‘Exactly, let’s get to it!’ Trevor hoots, clapping once so loudly it peels and cracks like a gunshot. ‘Dick here has got the right idea.’ 

‘ _Rick_ ,’ whatever the fuck his face is, says reflexively.

‘That’s what I said: _Dick_. Dick, is going to show us his hand. Because I’m fucking tired now, I have had a long, long day. You know what I mean boys?’ Trevor leans in real close, eyes flitting to Michael momentary before returning to the Carr brothers in mock discretion. His got a leg up on his cushioned chair, forearms resting on his knee like a cowboy, ‘One more second of looking at your big fucking mugs, and I’ll have no choice but to rip your colons out and tie them in a lovely little bow; Christmas is right round the corner.’

Michael forces his eyes still so that they don’t roll back into his head from bewilderment; Trevor never fails to be inventive or true to his threats. He feels Trevor’s eyes slide toward his again, his breath across his neck; at the same time Michael has to force down a smirk. 

Lester’s breathing on the other hand seems to have faded completely. His just a lump of braincells by this point. Though to be fair this is far from his arena, several fucking ballparks in fact.

The Carr boys stare back with their coal black eyes, Lou’s scarred cheek and Dick’s - _Rick’s_ \- bald head all making it obvious that Trevor may have finally managed to put a nail in all their coffins.

‘What you got to say you fat turd, huh?’ Lou rises to his feet, eyes rapt on Michael’s; suddenly his dwarfed by a six-foot five mountain troll. ‘You gonna let your bitch do all the snapping tonight?’ 

A chair clatters and skids across the floorboards; Michael is on his feet. His got a hand on the table and his other one rigid with the force of holding his colt before he can think twice. He grinds his teeth and narrows his eyes. 

‘You just hand over what is our’s and we’ll head out. Nothin’ to get worked up about,’ Michael forces his voice down, cocks his head almost pleasantly, bows his eyebrows like he knows works on just about everyone his heckled.

Rick seems to still be trying to formulate a single thought as he remains stuck to his seat, watching the exchange of threats flit above his bald skull. Lou is further ahead.

‘Nothing is your’s. So you take that human sack of shit,’ Lou points at Lester. ‘And take your little terrier,’ he points at Trevor, ‘And get the fuck out.’

Michael exhales, tries to ease up, remind himself they’re too high-up for a dick-measuring contest with the likes of them. ‘Gotta ask you one more time.’ 

‘You found a suit and suddenly you're some big-shot?’ Lou growls, his shoulder hunching with every word, ‘That ain't how it fucking works. Time someone reminded you that you’re just a no good trailer trash cu-’

Trevor leaves that last word a mystery, sliding across the table in a blur. Michael’s next breath breaks things down into slow motion as his heart starts to explode in his chest. There’s long _crunch_ sound that has Lou falling to the ground like a demolished building, Trevor rides his tail and arches away from the knife Lou’s got in his free, flailing hand. 

At this, Rick lifts with a defensive cry. Michael leaps forward, wrestling him to the ground with two hands in his collar and pinning his shoulders down with his knees. The gun in Rick’s hand flies across the floor and Michael rips the loose cushion from the seat beside him, pressing it down onto his face, he places the barrel of his gun over it and empties a bullet into the cushion; facing away as the kickback sends up a puff of bloodied feathers. 

There’s another roar as Michael stumbles to his feet. Under the the table he catches a glint of Lester’s glasses and his pale hands clutched around the paper-bag with the diamonds the Carr brothers had been withholding. His face is white as a sheet and he nods at Michael. 

A heavy cry wrenches his attention back to Trevor and Lou. Suddenly, the backed up adrenaline floods his system and things rip forward at warp speed. He watches with hazy terror as Lou, whose easily got a 100 pounds on Trevor shoves him away and straddle his torso before pulling up a switchblade. It shimmers, it looks like a cartoon mockery as it easily slides under Trevor's ribs. A guttural howl interrupts the relative quiet and it all happens so quickly it's done before Michael steadies his arm and shoots Lou through the ear. 

Blindly he shoves Lou's body off Trevor and takes a knee beside him, hoisting his head onto his lap. Michael's sight swims a little as the blood starts to pool under them.

‘Jesus, Mikey,’ Trevor hisses and grins; his eyes flickering, glancing toward his ineffective hands holding onto his mid-section. ‘I thought you were good at fucking poker.’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No one dies, it's ok!  
> Thanks for reading! I'll be putting out the next part in the next few days. Update will also be more frequent so I can finish this before uni starts up again. Also there will continue to be a majority of parts from Michael's POV because I feel like that's the lesser POV when it comes to pre-canon stories. But never fear there will also be parts from Trevor's POV coming up. 
> 
> Please leave a comment yo, let me know
> 
> PSS, Technical Note: Misbek is the fictional version of Bismarck in North Yankton (North Dakota, apparently) that I came up with


	5. When to Fold Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continuation of previous chapter.

Trevor . Fall 1993

Somewhere, something emits a low-pitched, resolute whine. It's strangely familiar, forcing his addled mind to push up the trailer he lived in with his mother and brother during the summer he turned ten.

It sounds again and snuffles at the end; a _fucking animal_ , letting it jerk him into consciousness like nails on his eardrums. His first sight is the blurry roof, and then the burning pain in his side makes itself known. The rest of his limbs feel like stacked raw meat. The scent of cleaning wipes, bandaids and shit fills his lungs like a burst of sunshine from a cloud. As it filters, it sears his lungs and he nearly feels better than he ever remembers feeling.

There is a hand clutching his own tightly, almost with crushing force. Trevor knows its shape; the blunt fingers and roughened palms, the small scar on the second and third knuckles without having to move his eyes, without lifting a finger. It's as familiar as his own two hands. 

In spite of himself Trevor frowns and swallows hard.

Slipping between the here and the past, he thinks the coyotes are crying around him. Whining and scratching like they would under the trailer, in the tall, dead grass as they scavenge for food and jostle for warmth. But his sharpening sight betrays dogs and cats in steel cages that line the walls. One set of particularly frightened eyes shining reflectively through the darkness, it's white teeth exposed as it yowls. 

Trevor inhales deeply, glancing down at his bandaged torso and his old bomber jacket laid out under him. Michael is a lump on the floor beside him, breathing roughly and still in the suit he wore at the poker game. It's smattered with dried blood all they way up to his chin.

Trevor grips Michael's hand and shakes it weakly. Immediately his eyes snap open; glass-blue with blown pupils. He quickly shuffles onto his haunches and pulls his hand away like he is in danger of being bitten.

‘Hey, T,’ he says, running a hand through his hair.

Trevor inclines his head and scans the room, ‘Where the fuck are we Mikey?’

‘Vet's,’ Michael says, clearing his throat. ‘Couldn’t go to the real fucking thing with half of Misbek PD on our asses.’

Trevor contemplates the answer, flexing the hand that was being held thirty seconds ago and wondering if he imagined it. Whilst he does this Michael busies himself with a cigarette, and peers into a cage with his back to him. He whistles softly at the agitated dog and it quietens with a sniffle. 

‘Now that’s what I call an interesting game of poker,’ Trevor chuckles, trying to put on his jacket as he sits up. The wound under his bandage burns, but it’s barely a scratch in his books. Nothing like breaking three fingers, two ribs or even his collarbone twice in one month. 

But knife's gash makes him hiss and swear as he twists his torso in the process.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Michael snaps, turning around intently, flicking his cigarette and stepping on it on his way to Trevor. After two full minutes of struggling with the fucking thing the jacket is finally on him. They sit with their backs agains the wall, Trevor breathing laboured and his eyes shut.

He can feel Michael looking at him, can smell the next cigarette.  Out of habit or maybe to disrupt the pity-party Trevor plucks it from him and discards it; lightly shouldering him. He can barely hold down a grimace as it strikes another bolt of pain through his side.

‘Let’s stay calm and I won’t have to get up in this state and kick your ass, T,’ Michael lights another one and sighs. ‘You did stupid fucking thing, running at that piece of shit troll with your bare hands.’

‘Yeah well, sometimes you gotta suck it up when the cause is right, Mikey,’ Trevor snorts, lips tugging up when Michael looks at him again. ‘Not that you would understand.’

A silence falls into the crest of the look transferring between them, generating a voice of its own, low and deep like an engine under a bonnet.

‘You aren’t meant to be my fucking bodyguard,’ Michael says thickly. ‘You’re meant to be the pain-in-my-ass, self-interested partner.’

A tide of anger rises in Trevor’s chest, and his about to show as much, but the injury's snuffed out a little of his fire. Besides, Michael ain’t exactly lying either; since Amanda, Tracey and then Jimmy happened things have been different. These past two years were hardly like anything they had before, not even shadow in comparison. 

In some ways it’s made them strangers in ways they never thought they would be, and who the fuck would risk everything for a stranger?

A thought rises up that questions if Michael would do the same. He's about to look away, but something in Michael's intent gaze snags him,  ‘For what it’s fucking worth, thanks for having my back, T.' 

Before the moment slips away Trevor takes his chance, and leans close until the other thief closes the gap. Trevor tastes cigarettes on his lips, knows Michael's right hand is still occupied by the lit smoke as his left hand softly claims his neck. The tenderness between them melts as quickly as it crystallised; Michael pushing forward harshly and reaching for the nape of his neck.

Trevor parts his lips with his tongue and cocks his head to the left; letting the pain in his side flush away with the leaden heat at the pit of his stomach. He snakes a hand into Michael's hair and wrests a moan from him he hasn't heard in a year. For a minute there's respite from the cold floor and the undecided shit-show that is his life. 

Without warning Michael breaks the kiss and turns away. He takes a drag of his cigarette as if nothing has happened despite his hand that continues to rest awkwardly against Trevor's clavicle, eventually falling to his thigh. 

While smoke curls in the air Trevor shuts his eyes and let's his head loll against the wall behind them.  Things begin to stir in the darkness inside his lids. Trevor reaches for the hand still in his lap; but by the time he gets there it's gone. Throughout the night he wades the inky waters of sleep looking for it, coming up short each time until the coyote's howl keeps him under for good. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah! halfway point, folks


	6. A Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Small warning for sexual themes in this chapter.

Michael. Summer 1991

The storm had been gathering for hours while they sat in the hot, slippery rays of sun. All the while finishing two six packs between the three of them they could hear the thunder creep across the horizon. Lester fled early, examining the sky worriedly at the first sign of lightening and within minutes shuffling back to his room. 

So it was only the two of them left; willing to brave the next strikes of lightening and the humid air for precious moments of nothingness. 

Michael leaned back, rolling his head between his shoulders and squinting at a dead bee in the pool. The humidity threatened to crush him if it weren’t for his feet in the pool and the icy beer in his hand. But he still thought it was a damn sight better than the fucking North Yankton cold.

A glance at Trevor across the water reveals the weather agrees with him too. His splayed across a deck chair, arms flung behind his head, wearing the flamingo pink board-shorts he swiped from a store yesterday, eyes shut and brow unconcerned. 

Trevor looks so different, Michael thinks hazily, if someone sees him now they won't see a man capable of murder, or robbery or any of the other shit they get up to. 

Michael looks away, cutting of the thoughts that trail behind that first one.

The motel is silent as if to express reproach, but it's only empty on account of hurricane season. The walls facing the pool are garish turquoise, and the doors swamp green with yellow and green stripped awnings above the dusty windows. Eventually his thoughts turn to general contemplations, and his careful to keep his eyes shut this time. 

After seven years on the road, Michael considers this a sweet spot; a perfect crescendo on which to plateau. His well-established career of crime, burgeoning into spots of successful bank robberies and a steady arms/drug transport side business; a beautiful wife and soon to be two rosy-cheeked children in a quaint, porched home, and in between that - this. His freedom. 

The thunder rumbles, a breeze licks away some of the heat, lift his hair. Despite himself Michael skims his eyes over Trevor again. In the brief space of time his drunk another beer and stretched out with his arms and legs hanging suspended in the air. Trevor doesn't exist in the same universe as quaint porches, or white picket fences. The truth is it _shouldn't_ work, because lately all Michael can think of is that white picket fence and some goddamn normalcy. 

But it don’t _matter_ that it shouldn't work, because it's been fine so far. And his always been a firm believer of,  _why go fixin' something if it ain't broke._

* * *

Trevor 

It’s not until he hears the third clap of thunder that he evaluates moving. Even then, it's with a half-hearted obligation to not being electrocuted. He hasn't been this warm in his life, and it's something he could get used to. Trevor recalls the little job from two nights ago, the money in his bank, the baggie of crystals in his room, and Michael across the water. He grins to himself, bats away something buzzing near his ear. 

At the forth clap, he lazily peels open his eyes, looks down and toward Michael; his head is lolling back onto his shoulders, a piece of hair falling onto his forehead, chest strung out and his feet dipped in the water. As sure as the first fat drops of rain, his stomach roils with pleasure. Unseen by any resident in the dead motel, or any fucking pair of eyes in the living world for that matter, he smirks and keeps watching him; this voyeuristic compulsion of his is only secret for the sake of the reason for it. 

But soon enough Michael opens his eyes and looks right back at him as if he could sense his gaze. His eyes are mirrors in the smothered light of the day, jaw set and hair grease-dark. Trevor considers snapping something lewd at him, or just flipping him off, but their sight has locked for too long for that sort of conclusion. 

Without letting go of their tenacious lines of sight, Trevor rises and goes to him. 

When he stands beside Michael, he looks up at the sky and motions toward the the gathered clouds, the bruised lines. 'Let's get out of here.' Trevor reaches out his hand and Michael helps himself up, but doesn’t drop it for a prolonged moment. He feels the pressure with which his ribs seem to individually crack inwards, stomach punctured with all the violence that broken bones muster. A few drops of sweats roll down Michael's neck, and follow the hollow of his throat to his chest. Trevor runs his tongue across the insides of his teeth unconsciously, but notices that air is coming up short. Dazzled in the heat, and lost in the wilderness of details he forgets whatever the fuck else his life is made up of. 

‘Come on,’ Michael mutters, nudging him in the shoulder without looking away.

Trevor hums in agreement and they walk to the room one behind the other, on some imperial march they're no longer voters of. As soon as they enter the room Trevor's hand goes for the door behind him and Michael's for the curtain, ripping them shut. 

* * *

 Michael

Trevor is being so firm and steady it terrifies the life out of Michael. Somewhere in the back of his head he wonders if this is a pre-emptive strike to being strangled, or being coaxed into darkness only to be outed by some hidden knife sliding between his ribs. 

It doesn't matter, Michael recognises at that second, he would let it happen even if he knew it was coming. 

Then they stand there, lulled into some other place by the storm-charged air, embracing, until Trevor finally pulls his head back a fraction and kisses him. Open mouthed and without any intention of chasteness, it pulls the life from him, makes him moan like some inexperienced kid. Without thought he puts a hand on Trevor’s neck and deepens the kiss. 

When he comes back for air, the thunder and lightening have picked up and are rattling the windows; the rain touching down like fingers tapping the glass. Michael blearily remembers an early afternoon prediction of a typhoon, notes of warning for leaving televisions on and listening for sirens.  Trevor dips down, his breath hot on his neck; when his mouth opens on the line of Michael's collarbone his head fills with a buzzing so loud it would block the loudest siren.  Drunk on the feeling, he pushes Trevor backward until he hits the door and their bodies are touching chest to thigh. The feeling of Trevor's sun-warmed skin dismantles his last coherent thought, forces his eyes shut and squeezes the breath out of him for some time. 

‘You’re killing me, Mikey,’ Trevor mumbles as he licks and brushes his lips across his collarbones, a hand twisting into his hair. Michael feels himself being pushed until his back is against the door, and Trevor flush against him. Entrapment of the situation pulls his head out of the fog momentarily. He takes stock and braces his hands on the two sloping shoulders before him. The clumsy momentum slots Michael dick against Trevor's inner thigh and he snaps his hips towards the pressure, his clawed hold tightening. Michael maneuvers him toward the bed, straddles his lap when he falls backward. 

It's too much and not enough. 

'Off, T,' bursts out of Michael as he stands up and kicks out of his shorts whilst Trevor follows suit with shaky hands. The second they're both bare, Michael rolls forward, collapsing onto his knees, with one of Trevor's legs over his thigh for what's too follow. Lips sealed against one another again; Michael takes both of them in hand, Trevor stammering his name into his mouth from the sudden contact. Despite the need to keep going he stops, blindly reaching for a small bottle he'd picked up with some half-baked idea on their last Texaco stop before the motel.

The sudden shock of its fruition catches Michael off guard. He moves back and looks into Trevor's eyes, wild and crack-blown to cloud nine. His lips are kiss-red and trembling, his cock twitches hard in Michael's palm. 

'What the fuck are you waiting for, Mikey?' Trevor mutters breathlessly. Suddenly his hand knocks away Michael's and gives his dick one hard, good stroke that makes him see white, cry a swear. Michael makes efficient work of grabbing the bottle, slicking his hands and cock.  

After that it's rote - it _should be_ rote - but the details fall into Michael's lap with the heaviness that they did the first time nearly five years ago. He weighs down more, so that Trevor's legs will fall further part, and open him up to his hand. 

'So fuckin' tight,' he mummers into Trevor's ear  when he reaches a finger inside him. He stiffens for a moment, a throaty groan escaping him after the epicentre of shock seems to ripple out in waves. Michael's cock jumps at the noise, forcing him to take a moment so he won't fall apart from just watching Trevor lick his lips and keep his mouth open to a raspy, low cry. He adds a second finger and Trevor's eyes roll back into his head, hips grinding down on his hand. 

‘Oh fuck, oh God, M,’ he pants, his hand tightening in Michael's hair painfully, their foreheads knocking into each other. 'You're...I...' 

Michael can't let go of the words Trevor misses, even though he knows what they are, 'Say it.' And as if to wrestle it from him, he moves his fingers until Trevor's mouth tips open in another cry. In spite of being gone three ways to Sunday, Trevor won't let up, arching in toward Michael's dick instead, trying to get closer. Infinitely closer.

'Say it, just, say it,' Michael voice strains against breaking, pulling out and tipping his cock against him, but not pushing it. His thighs shake and jump with the effort, Trevor clinging of his shoulders. 

'Why the fuck won't _you_ ,' Trevor, it seems, has no pretences about his voices breaking under the pressure, he opens his eyes and they bore into Michael's. His angry, its the same sort of glare before he kills a man for no good reason, but there is something else too; a fracturing of light in the hazel depths that suggests an honest to god _reason_ for the fury.  

There is a crack of thunder, a lick of lightening from under the gingham curtains.

 _It doesn't matter. It's too fucking late anyway_ , Michael thinks. 

Sight swimming, Michael covers Trevor's mouth with his own and pulls his hips closer, his vision shutters to erratic frames as he eases himself in. He senses Trevor's fingers on the nape of his neck, the dark pink light from the afternoon on his chest, velveteen muscle enclosing him entirely. Michael pauses to catch his breath, recompense his shredded mind for the lost sense of time. He begins to thrust into him in long, languid movements, adjusting after each stroke to find the right angle. 

Over the throb of black cumulus and rain, the admonition finally does escape Trevor in a slur; neck tipped back and Michael's mouth open against it. At the end Michael  _feels_ the words pour from him in messy rumbles. That he loves him, like its the most spectacular revelation known to any living being .  Trevor comes untouched, his body slewing and shuddering violently as he struggles to hold on. When he begins to go limp from the effort and  exhaustion Michael fucks him quickly and roughly to his own end; he comes with a wordless shout. 

Michael collapses to the side and tucks Trevor into his chest without thinking. He holds him close in spite of the stifling heat and sweat that's soaked them like rain. For a second he thinks the siren has gone off, but its his own ears ringing. The room sounds abjectly with rain and their shallow breathing. The lightening which follows brightens the four walls generously like an unwelcome burst of morning sun. Some minutes or hours or decades pass them by like that.

Michael listens through the smattering seizures of his own heart until it very gradually slows down. After a particularly loud clap, Trevor turns to him, only his sillouhette visible in the fickle light. His face becomes visible for a split second when lightening strikes again; his eyes are a lukewarm hazel, cheeks flushed and hair mussed. He kisses him in that strange, in-between moment of day and night. 

As soon as the light is gone, Michael stumbles from the bed, breaking the seal of his arms around Trevor. The sudden coldness of his own body strikes him as otherworldly.  

‘Have to make a call,’ he mutters gruffly, wiping his stomach with a discarded shirt then wearing a clean one and pulling on some track pants. Despite the newly laundered clothes he can still smell Trevor, feel him, everywhere. 

‘Not now you won't. All the lines from Miami to fucking Saskatoon are probably down,’ Trevor's tone is biting, but his voice is raw and broken from moaning and whining, and maybe even a little drowned in melancholy. He  is reclined against the pillows and bunched duvet; just as he was on the deck chair. Despite his wide shoulders, the long scar in his side and slovenly features, his never looked more vulnerable. 

Michael glances away, starts patting his pockets for smokes busily.  ‘Worth a fucking try,’ he mutters, clenching and unclenching his jaw. 

He finally spots his Redwoods on the dresser and swipes them, lights one before his out the door. Trevor doesn't protest for once. He pulls the door shut with such force behind him it sounds with twice the frequency of a thunderclap. A strike of light exposes the sky as he hurries away, the trail of cigarette smoke following him down the corridor, bare feet slapping the wet concrete. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> had this chapter ready to go and I kind of couldn't wait a week to put it up so...here it is!
> 
> I've edited it as of 24/8 - renamed it as well because the old one didn't make sense anymore.


	7. Go to Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the massive, massive delay - time got away from me. Small warning for drug use in this chapter.

Michael . Winter 1987

Michael cases the place in a matter of several paces when they first arrive at the hideout hotel in Los Venturas. Outside the window, neon glitters in abstractions and a fusion of all things near and far, a cacophony of red, pinks, blues and greens searing his eyes. He glances off-handedly around the room again just to mark off his “check twice” rule. There's a double bed next to a miserable cot, small clean bathroom with a flickering bulb, a slatted closet missing its bottom rows, a busted tv and old VCR player, and the square balcony hanging 7 levels up and facing toward the boardwalk. He can practically hear the blood crash in his ears in waves timed to the electric ebb and flow of the city; all those lives, all the things that have been so foreign and revered in the movies his seen finally under him, splayed open and bleeding in arterial bursts.

‘Want me to step out for a bit, Mikey? Let you rub one out to the view?’ Trevor’s voice cuts across the hypnotic trance. His got three gym bags hanging off him, two being the take from their latest bank job and the third his clothes, spare boots and possibly what’s left of his toothbrush.

‘Fuck you,’ Michael says, but his heart isn't in the argument. 

Trevor chuckles, drops the bags by the bed and comes to stand beside him, tucking his hands into his back jean pockets and observing the city beyond the murky hotel window. 

He let’s out a low whistle, ‘The capital of meth, working girls and money.’

‘They’re prepared for low-lives like us, don’t even think about it, T,' he says without looking at him, still in awe of everything around him.

He turns and looks at Michael, holding his eyes steadily, a smile curling onto his lips as he waves toward the bags, ‘Not such low-lives anymore.’

It was true too, they had their largest take yet; seventy thousand they cleared in the bank ten miles east of Las Venturas only twelve hours ago. Most notably, no, _miraculously_ without Lester's input. They would have to be holed up in this room for the next 24 hours just to be certain what’s their’s would remain so, but it was a small price to pay. 

Michael grins at the thought andTrevor pulls the front of his collar into a tight fistful. 

It catches him off-guard, a heavy feeling in his throat dropping to his gut like an anvil. There’s the scent of gunpowder and worn-in leather, the bright pink neon from the hotel’s sign caught in Trevor’s dark lashes and hair. Somewhere in his chest he can feel that this is bigger than the money, bigger than a single night in the middle of a desert that will forget them. He knows he won't - couldn't if he tried - to forget the moment Trevor moves in gradually, his hand loosening from the grip of a criminal accomplice to the softness of someone else entirely. 

Michael's chest tightens with an undefinable feeling. 

There are some words close at hand, but they aren’t the sort of things you say in hotel room on the inner-west edge of Sin City.  Trevor’s lips meet his. Michael abandons his thoughts and commits them to the pressure of his mouth, and the hand that lands on his neck.

* * *

 Trevor

The sky matted into a dull purple as the morning drew closer. Trevor leans forward and spits over the rails from the plastic chair he lords over the city in. All the lights and the motion is fuzzy around the edges, a bone-deep contentment humming in him. Despite the desert winter and wearing only his underwear he doesn’t feel the cold. He smoked a little bowl nearly three hours ago, but his coming down quickly now.

His pipe is by his feet, and his surprised it didn't break on the tiles when he dropped it. As things return to normalcy, he recalls leaving bed and being here since; Michael watching him retrieve his pipe and asking for him to pass the last few ounces of blow. The thought of Michael; which he’d been avoiding during his detour to the balcony, comes up unbidden and sticks to him. It’s just as comfortable as the swirling, fading drug in his system, but he knows it’s the kind of fix that won't stay fixed for long. The sort that won’t fade and it scares him shitless, brings a tremor to his hands leaning on the railing. Trevor’s been fucked over enough that he can’t trust it; has been encumbered by enough substances to know discontinuation in the indulgence will be excruciating.

Trevor stands, sniffs at the thought and shakes his head at himself viciously. He escapes himself in the hotel room before things get ugly. 

There is a buzzing coming from beside the bed, the lamp turned on and Michael sitting with his back to him, wearing no shirt and his jeans. His holding something like he holds his gun when he cleans it. The quiet buzzing goes on and off again. It puts Trevor on edge, makes him press his tongue to the inside of his teeth so hard it hurts his jaw. 

‘What the hell is that?’ his voice is rough with disuse and smoke. He sits close to him, their arms touching, Michael’s leg bouncing up with pent up energy from the coke. 

‘Tattoo gun,’ he says simply, testing it out again, the buzzing flickering on and off in the quiet room. ‘Used to sell them in prison for protection, commissary, smokes. You know the story, Trev.’ he waves away the question with his free hand. 

By Michael's feet the VCR player is dismantled down to its wiring, the casing flung away, there's half a roll of duct tape and his Swiss Army knife strewn beside it.

‘Is that my fucking toothbrush?’ he asks when he spots the bright purple handle peeking out from between Michael’s fingers, holding together the needle and the motor fixed on it’s end. 

Michael tests the trigger and this time the sound makes Trevor chuckle.

‘I’ll buy you a new one for a tattoo,’ Michael turns to him in enquiry, cocking his head to the side as if his sweet talking a bank teller, or a stripper before he has his way with them. Cocks his head in the way he does when he needs to be _charming_. 

Even in the dim light Trevor can see his pupils are shot to hell. The darkness sits in a thin ring of greyish-blue, the whites of his eyes pink. He knows this move, what comes after, what has gone into it. Trevor can't find it in himself to give a fuck that it's an overused manoeuvre, but it's actually Michael's melancholy, drugged smile that makes him  shrug his assent. 

Gently, Michael presses a hand into his shoulder until his half turned away and sets to work after dousing his neck from the bottle of vodka on the bedside table and drying it with a discarded shirt on the bed. The next hour or two melt away, the sound of the tattoo gun’s buzzing and the feeling of Michael’s hands on his skin lulling Trevor into dream states. He hardly feels the needle, the ink. He can’t see the space on the shoreline where the water edges onto the sand; where reality ends and the sleep catches up. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind he hopes it’s not a movie quote or some stripper’s name. 

* * *

 Michael

Trevor drives and Michael nurses his hang-over beside him. Smoke streaming out of his window, glasses low on his nose to stop the setting sun from burning out his eyes. 

‘You smoke one more of those things I’m going to sell you for parts, Mikey,’ Trevor grouses theatrically, arms taut on the wheel.

‘Smart business move - I'd be worth a mint, T. You could retire early,’ Michael answers with a smirk, finishing the one in his hand and snuffing on the side of the truck and letting it fall to the road. With a side glance he reaches behind his ear and lights that one too. 

Trevor’s hand shoots out for the rest of the pack on the dashboard, tosses it out over his shoulder in one swift move. 

‘You fucking piece of shit,’ Michael shakes his head and tries to make the final cigarette last. 

His too tired to really fight; to start a long, pointless squabble even for entertainment. After a week of visiting everything in Venturas from the best bars, raves and strip clubs he can’t fathom the energy. They barely have a thousand a’ piece left and the lustre of city is fast fading in the rearview mirror as a dull break from the rush that a bank job, or a jewellery job offers. It was too stale for all the distraction that mass of excess could throw at them. Michael’s been in the game for only four years, but he can tell there’s almost nothing that's ever going feel like a fast and close take feels. 

Trevor changes the synth station to classic rock tunes; Kenny Loggins, the soft and bleary bass kinder on his headache than the lightening bars of an electro outfit. Trevor looks as sober as he’ll ever be, leaning forward onto the wheel a little. Michael can’t help stealing glances of him; wearing a too-tight Impotent Rage t-shirt and his black leather bomber, the tattoo he’d given him almost a week ago visible above the low collar. 

He must catch him looking because he shoots Michael a quick look, clears his throat, ‘So, been meaning to ask why you put a, ah bird on me, M.’

Michael busies his gaze out the window as if his scouting the dead, orange landscape. ‘It’s a swallow, not a fucking pigeon.’

‘Alright, why the fuck did you put a swallow on me?’ 

‘I don’t know what to tell you, bro,’ Michael shrugs, pushing his voice low into his throat lest it arouse suspicion. Casual, be fucking casual, he tells himself, ‘Was too buzzed to know what the hell I was doing - first thing I could think of. It’ll fade soon if you don’t want it, bad ink anyway.’

For once, or for one of the rare few times, Trevor stays quiet. His going to figure out what a swallow means eventually, Michael knows that much, counts on it. The entire fucking point, after all, was that he wouldn't and can't fathom saying the things that tattoo means.  

Michael turns up the song despite his bursting head and slides his aviators further up his nose; forces everything out of his head with too much noise and too much sun. The road flies underneath them, the loose gravel like a static crash of waves into the shore, the wide, flat desert a sea around them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter already planned, but uni is happening at the moment so I'll put it up soon..ish. Please comment and tell me your thoughts on this chapter!


	8. Picket Fence

Trevor . Summer 1993

Lester clutches the safety handle as Trevor speeds through the streets of North Yankton's better half. Suburbia, neat rows and shingled roofs whir by. When they reach the house he rips the steering wheel to the right, shredding the nature strip under the wheels. He cuts the engine and sits very still, trying to calm his fucked nerves, the bundles of tension making his shoulders hunch and his jaw clench.

‘We have to get moving if we’re going to have enough time to plan this,’ Lester interrupts in that wheezing way of his, ignoring the glazed look in Trevor’s eyes, his whitened knuckles on the wheel. 'Michael said she is visiting her parents just for the day.'

Head swimming with the sound of his own rushing blood, Trevor glances at Lester and momentarily considers how to best fuck him up. Maybe smash his head into the window, or jam a hand around his throat, or take his glasses and snap them in half so he'll stumble around like a blind mole for the rest of the day.

But under Trevor's full gaze Lester goes still like a deer in headlights; it's so pathetic all he can do is snort and shake his head at him. Fucking useless. Trevor gruffly slams the car door open and exits, throwing it shut behind him.

The house facing him is something out of Brady Bunch reruns, smaller and more modern but its same fucking idea. Small town Americana; picket fence, gold-buttoned doorbell, white awnings and domesticated ferns around the porch. In the middle of the lawn a cubby house and a toy dining table set echo the house, it’s fake little fucking values, some dream out of a wait-room magazine. 

Trevor shakes his head, kicking up the recently disturbed grass under his boot. He feels like a piss-poor, worthless trailer kid faced with how the other half lives. 

‘I don’t like it anymore than you do,’ Lester has shuffled up next to him, his newly acquired cane in hand. ‘But we have to make a move on this job now if we want to get back on track.’

Lester proceeds to scan the street suspiciously, beady eyes darting to a neighbour watering his plants, then some kids speeding down the street on their chopper bikes. He shakes his head to himself and makes a move down the path. Trevor digs his hands into his pockets and follows, the anger leaving him with every step, pushing a dejected exhaustion into his bones instead. There’s too much of it to fight, too many picket fences, lukewarm dinners, and half-hearted fucking going on behind these closed doors. 

It’s like his stepped onto some alien fucking planet, slowly succumbing to it's gravity.

And where the fuck does that leave Michael, or at least the Michael who drove of almost half a year ago. Trevor tries to imagine Michael cutting the grass or washing windows, but it’s some faceless fucking stranger doing those things. It’s not the same Michael who whooped once they hit sixty miles per hour on a getaway, whose hands were always steady when he aimed to kill, who hardly blinked when he got a gun in his face.  Trevor rubs his neck and spits into the lawn roughly.

The doorbell chirps, Lester presses it once and moves away politely. A few seconds pass without response, so Trevor scowls at him and starts jabbing the bell mercilessly.

A breathless wailing starts to compete with his ringing, blooming into a siren when the door is finally slammed open.

‘Fuckin’ A, Trevor!’ Michael snaps at him. His got a dishcloth over one shoulder and a kid in the crook of his other arm, her mouth thrown open as she continues to scream, eyes screwed shut under an unruly mop of blonde hair and cheeks red with huge effort.

The sight is so absurd Trevor’s eyebrows shoot up involuntarily, and Lester dissolves into a coughing fit. 

Michael rubs his forehead, seemingly deaf to the crying kid at this point - _his_ crying kid. Trevor numbly follows him inside, and can't see anything but Michael holding her. His head reels like after the first pull of meth when he realises she's got Michael's eyes, the shape of his face too. 

‘I just had her down for a nap,’ he sighs defeatedly.

The house phone starts up in the kitchen.

‘Fuck,’ Michael hisses, throwing a glance over his shoulder, to the kid - _his_  kid, _his kid_ , apparently - and then Trevor. ‘Hold her for a second.’

‘What?’ his voice comes out too high, too quiet, and before he knows how the fuck to stop the process Michael has already transferred his kid into his arms. She’s a little heavier than she looks, and smells like a high-end soap dispenser and snot.

Trevor glances at Lester for help, but he shakes his head furiously, inching away from him. 

‘Hey kid,’ Trevor mutters, a panicked chant of _shit, shit, shit_  starting up in his head.

* * *

 Michael

‘No, everything’s fine, fucking neighbours made noise…her crib…yeah Manda…course not,’ Michael blocks his free ear with a finger and presses the receiver closer to his face, trying to make things sound as under control as possible.

Michael’s head reels between Tracey’s cries, the ideas for the robbery he had been cooking up, and Amanda’s unending questions on the other side.

Suddenly Tracey goes silent. 

‘…bed by eight, otherwise she’ll be fussy when I get back,’ Amanda finishes. ‘What happened, Michael, did she just fall asleep?’

Michael nods into the phone mindlessly, leaning through the doorway of the kitchen as far as the cord will let him so he can check on them, but can’t see shit.

‘Michael?’

‘Uh, yeah, got tired. I have to go, talk to you tonight, Manda. I got everything handled,’ he says quickly, hanging up. In the following three seconds a million scenarios rush through his head, and not a single one matches the one that greets him when he almost crashes into the living room.

Trevor’s looking at Tracey with something like awe and fear and confusion at the same time as she reaches out to touch the car keys his dangling in front of her. She pulls her hand back when he jangles them briefly, miniature impotent rage keyring jumping, but she giggles at it with tears still drying on her cheeks. Trevor, seemingly still unaware of Michael’s - or anyone else’s presence, smiles briefly.

Somewhere in the background Michael can hear Lester carding through papers and setting up a board, but everything has gone underwater.  

‘Hey, do either of you still want to rob people?’ Lester’s nasal voice interrupts soon enough. ‘You know, get some of that little thing called money in the process?’

Michael hasn’t seen Trevor for a few months, maybe five and it shows when he finally meets his eyes. He looks a little thinner, tired and lost like his shot up something harder at some point and still isn’t sure where the ground ends and the sky starts.

Trevor frowns and the look goes out of him, hardening into something more familiar, defensive. He steps closer and motions for him to take Tracey back. When Michael reaches for her, she doesn’t reach back, just looks at Trevor and gurgles. He takes her back eventually, but her attention stays on Trevor, pointing at him when Michael sits on the couch with her in his lap. He ignores it, his heart stammering against his ribs.

Lester’s set up by the time Trevor sits on the other end of the three-seater, arm slung across the side of it. He looks like his never been in a living room in his life, like his been collaged next to the coffee table and the vase of flowers, Tracey’s little toys across the carpet. Hell, even Lester looks like his acclimatised better.

But the complexities of the bank job distract Michael soon enough; the issue of the getaway through an unfinished road, another crew member to hold a second gun, if the response time is consistent. Michael sets Tracey down on the carpet when she starts to squirm.

‘Nine-hundred thousand all in all, my twenty percent cut, the hired gun’s five, two percent to fund the set up, so your takes are about…’ Lester scratches his chin as he calculates, and Michael waits impatiently. Usually Trevor has this covered before they’ve even finished delegating, but his unusually quiet, no smart quips or convictions about loop holes and loose-ends either.

Michael looks over and immediately finds the reason why. Somehow, in that short time, Tracey has managed to surround Trevor with her toys. He watches as she stumbles away and retrieves a bright yellow airplane this time and hands it to him to add to the growing number of toys on the couch. She stops beside him and shakes Trevor’s hand with the plane in it, demanding that he play with it.

‘The crop-duster, huh? I can fly that, but I won't be happy about it,’ he mumbles, eyes bright as he glides it across the air above her head. Tracey grins widely and squeals quietly, rushing away to get a different toy.

Trevor looks across at Michael and shrugs. ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Michael shakes his head little too quickly. His tired and disarmed, unsure how all this pans out, or hell if any of it even makes sense.  ‘I think she likes you, T.’

‘Good, she’s my favourite Townley,’ he smirks, taking the little St Bernard toy she offers, but just laying it beside the other toys instead of playing with it this time. Tracey's lower lip pouts for a second, then she climbs the couch amongst her possessions and picks up the plane again, swishing it in the air clumsily with renewed determination to get more attention from Trevor.

‘I think an SUV would make the most sense, easiest to jack - plenty around downtown actually,’ Lester’s voice comes back online. ‘But the crew is a problem, the Irish brothers are down south for the summer, we need someone new.

* * *

 By the time Lester has run out of ideas a couple of hours have passed and Tracey is tucked under Trevor’s arm fast asleep, her hand clutched in his jacket sleeve.

‘I presume you have beer in your fridge?’ Lester asks finally, already moving in that direction.

Michael doesn’t bother with an answer, instead standing and stretching his legs. Trevor has picked up the crop duster again, swivelling it in one hand to occupy himself. He has been unusually quiet and it unnerves Michael not to know if it’s been because of Tracey or if this is how it will be between them now. 

‘Where have you been, T?’ he asks after a moment, pushing his voice low to keep it casual. 

‘Oh you know Mikey. Around. Flew some cargo,’ Trevor shrugs, his hardened eyes meeting his own. ‘Couple of smaller jobs, a bank with a crew down south.’ 

Michael tries not to really think of the connotations, the gloating tone. God fucking knows his happy finally being somewhat normal. But then there is this; the road, the money and a gun so well-adjusted to his hand no one could stop him if they tried. There’s Trevor. 

‘Let me take her off your hands, get you a beer man,’ he gently picks up Tracey, her grip transferring to his shoulder. Trevor doesn’t say anything as he stands, stretches his arms above his head, then goes to follow Lester. 

‘I missed you, T,’ Michael blurts before he knows what his doing. 

Trevor freezes in his tracks and throws a look back; wide and a little wild around the edges. ‘Yeah, sure Mikey,’ he voice is gravel and dust of an unsealed road, blood in an open wound. ‘Me too.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave a comment please. Tell me if it was good! Tell me if it sucked! Let me know !
> 
> Chapter 10 will be 2 parts so this fic will technically be 11 parts (compensating for When to Fold chapters which were technically one)


	9. For Better

 Michael . Summer 1987

Michael takes the first shift after they pass through Wyoming, and get’s them as far south as Fort Collins, by which point its still mostly green, flat fields as far the eye can see. But his tired from the previous night, the burning end of a chain of jobs on three liquor stores. Trevor pisses and moans about taking over, swears him up and down in that good-natured, terrifying-to-strangers way of his. But he get’s them to Denver in one piece, humming whatever shit is on the radio while he does it. 

Denver is a low-lying city, nothing too tall that scrapes the sky, it’s obvious in the darkness as they pull up to a fast-food joint for dinner. Trevor insists on trying to finish their biggest burger, and largest fries and he falls asleep as soon as his in the passenger seat. Michael’s eyes itch too, but he takes them an hour out further west near one of Colorado’s national parks everyone and their mother’s being swearing on for decades. 

It don’t look that special in the darkness. 

He tucks the car into the crook of some pines, grabs the ratty blanket he takes everywhere with him and lies in the bed of the truck, feet hanging out the open back, and his shoulder’s interrupted by the grooves. Above him, the sky is licked with stars, and Trevor’s snores rise softly over the sound of crickets. 

It’s sometime after midnight that Trevor’s snoring stops and the truck door snaps open and clips shut. Michael’s on the cusp of drifting off, finally comfortable, wedged on the right side of the bed. He can see Trevor’s vague sillouhette against the too-bright sky, his hair awry and one big hand rubbing his face. The truck bed creaks with his weight when he hauls himself over the side, but he makes quick work of lying down next to Michael, tugging the blanket to share. It covers them both, but only just

‘Didn’t mean to wake you,’ he says, even though he did. 

‘Don’t matter, you drive first tomorrow,’ Michael answers quietly, his voice sleep-rough, and eyes still shut

‘Fuck you,’ Trevor sighs, stretching out his arms above his head, cracking his knuckles, shoulders popping.

‘Yeah, you too,’ Michael yawns. 

There’s a few beats of silence, and Michael can tell Trevor is surveying the stars by the quiet sounds of his jacket collar brushing his neck, the way the air shifts close to him gently.

‘You know I’ve been thinkin’-’

‘Woah, Mikey, no need for drastic measures.’

He elbows Trevor in the ribs, keeping his eyes shut all the while. The quiet huff of laughter that escapes his partner in crime is enough concession to go on. ‘Been thinkin’ we should plan long-term. I’m sick of sticking up fucking liquor stores, and Texacos on the edge of nobody towns,’ he opens his eyes, ‘we can do better, T.’

Hiking himself up on one elbow, Trevor looks at him. Their eyes catch even though Michael had been planning on avoiding it. In the darkness, the whites of Trevor’s eyes glitter, two pieces of white in his dark irises. ‘ _Captain, my Captain_ and all that shit, Mikey,’ he starts, looks away and up, ‘but I like what we got so far.’

‘We can’t do it forever,’ Michael clears his throat when Trevor doesn’t say anything else. ‘Can’t run forever.’

* * *

 Michael . Spring 1990

‘…for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer…’ the floor swims. His hands are clammy in Amanda’s, and his eyes are going dry because he can’t really seem to blink.

At the end of the old man’s words, he tastes “I do” more than he hears it come out of his mouth. He tries to kiss Amanda but he only catches the edge of her lips, awkwardly. There’s scattered applause, and under it a wall of silence. Cold, and tall and brown-grey. 

Amanda hooks his arm in her’s and proceeds toward the back of the church, the door. Michael swallows and looks over his shoulder. Trevor stands next to pastor, dwarfs the small man in all blacks. His eyes are red-rimmed and dark, and have two pieces of light in them where the open church doors a reflected. He runs a hand through his hair, cut close at a couple of inches for this very day, and his sets his jaw firmly. 

Michael smiles, thin-lipped and quickly, before turning away again.

* * *

 Trevor . Summer 1987

‘A trillion goddamn, fucking dollars,’ Trevor whoops, throws his arms up over his head, warm beer sloshing over his wrist.

‘Two trillion, one each,’ Michael corrects sloppily. 

Trevor grins at him, and takes another swig.

Michael takes a long pull on the joint, breath hissing as he inhales, and then let’s out a big, beautiful white plume of smoke. 

They trade vices, and the spectacle of stars above Trevor’s head threaten to burst. The shooting stars that have grown frequent in last ten minutes, they ripple and curl in his blurring vision. 

‘Bigger than a bank, you gotta think, T,’ Michael says, his voice throaty from the smoke. ‘You gotta think…I don’t know…gold, just bars of gold. Tonnes of it.’

‘I’ll drop you in and you grab them, then I’ll fly us out,’ Trevor says, falling onto his back with heavy thump as he exhales. 

The blunt’s at it’s end, but Michael takes it from him and sucks it right down to the filter before throwing it on the ground beside the truck next to the other two stubs.

There’s brief silence, suddenly Michaels claps, loudly. ‘Union Depository!’ 

That brightens Trevor’s eyes, and he’d sit right up if he didn’t feel so heavy and lax. ‘The government, it’s perfect Mikey. We swing in, take those sons of bitches for everything they’re worth. Fuck those fat-cats over. Put their tax dollars to some good fucking use for once.’

Michael dissolves into giggles. ‘Yeah T, you and I getting high and fucked are obviously top priority in the federal budget.’

‘Will be from now on, sweetheart,’ Trevor grumbles. 

From where his lying down, and Michael sitting, he can see him watching him. Trevor’s heart stutters, but he tells himself its the weed, and shit weed at that. It’s always made his chest just about explode. In spite of that he heaves himself upright, sits with his face only a few inches from Michael’s. 

With a shaking hand he reaches forward until his palm touches the tops of Michael’s knuckles where his hand is flat against the truck bed. Trevor tries to see more, eyes wide to take in all the light so he can scope out what Michael’s expression is. But there’s only a thin silver that lights the tops of his eyebrows, a triangle of light on his cheeks, and the curve of his bottom lip.

Trevor focuses on the slide of his hands against Michael’s, reaches up with his other hand until its at his jaw. It comes to him in pieces at first, because his done this in his daydreams. He has looked over at Michael driving, or just sitting there and thought about putting a hand to his face, softly, in rare moments.

He sees Michael’s throat work a swallow, head inclined toward Trevor's hand on his jaw. He closes the gap, kisses him firmly.

For a second nothing happens, but then Michael makes a noise deep in his throat and tilts his head. 

* * *

 Michael . Spring 1990

He keeps an eye in the rearview mirror as they curve away from the church yard, hands tight on the steering wheel. Michael doesn’t see him, as much as he looks, as thin as the crowd is. 

‘Colorado, here we come!’

Michael’s jumps in the seat beside her, the loudness of her voice scaring up the hair on the back of his neck. He keeps his eyes in front now.

She’s always wanted to see the place, she’s never been, _it’ll be romantic_ ; she’s explained to him. _It’ll be quiet. And just the two of them, and the baby on the way_.

It’ll be nice.

_It won’t be flashy, but it will be nice._

And at least they don’t drive all the way, ditching the car at the airport so they can pick it up when they get back. Michael gives a fake name too, because he doesn’t want to fork out for long-term parking - a parked car shouldn’t cost you shit.

Flying over Colorado it's green and red and orange. He spots the forests edging all the around the city, the sun setting over the west as they are getting in. Michael snaps his window shut. Beside him, Amanda is fast asleep. She’s a quiet sleeper.

* * *

 Trevor . Summer 1987

The sun rises from the other side of the road, and Michael’s got an arm thrown over him, and a leg hooked around his. Trevor blinks lazily, watches the sun inch over his chin, knowing the glare will either turn him away or wake him up when the sun touches his closed lids. The shadow moves quickly, and Trevor tries to remember every detail, the rapid movement of his closed eyes, his dark hair longer than the usual crop and lips slightly apart. 

He runs a thumb over Michael's jaw, ghosts it across his chin and resists touching his bottom lip, because that would wake him up. The thought of Michael waking up to him like this wrangles Trevor's guts into knots and before the sun can beat down and wake Michael up for him, Trevor slips out from under his heavy hand and get’s dressed beside the truck, picking his boots where they had fallen on the ground. He considers the hazy, impossible pace of the night, Michael's voice pitched low over the sound of crickets and wolves in the distant mountain ranges. Trevor schools the grin on his face into a grimace in spite of an absent audience, then stretches cat-like and long-ribbed. 

The orangey yellows are quite something over the sharp, jagged teeth of tree-tops. His chest swells briefly with possibilities as he looks on. There is a whorl of flashy ideas in his head like the first enlightenment after a shot of speed; the hot-skin adrenaline during a robbery, Michael's hand taut in his hair, racks upon racks of gold bars and a winding road without the setting sun to hide it. Endless _this_ , whatever _it_ is. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, still alive. I wanted to start a new fic, but I feel bad starting one without finishing this one.  
> Anywho, thanks for reading!


	10. Mount

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 1/2 - of the final pieces of this fic.

Trevor . October, 1995 

The days of Michael’s absence fold into weeks and months by October. Trevor treads the land like a half-wild dog, and in lieu of being fed by human hands he becomes content to snap at them just to be close. Every few days, depending on how well his brain can keep up with time in the haze of harder drugs, Trevor stumbles into a phone booth. With a scarred hand fresh with blood he dials an old number and listens to the dead line, the machine swallowing his small change, crickets in the reeds outside. 

He counts: two nickels out of the three-hundred and sixty thousand dollars that are to his name, five quarters, seven half-dollars but no Michael. No tail or head. _His good with numbers. Lester’s the brain, Trev’s the calculator._

Trevor entertains a phantom of Michael instead. Sitting at bars or in back alleys on cool, drifting autumn nights he listens intently for a tinny phone ring. When it inevitably does, floating down a hallway or a half opened door, he shuts his eyes and picks it up. The weight of the handset as real as the anvil of drugs in his chest. Michael sputters onto the line that stripper-fake tits is gone, that she’s taken the kids and all his money. Between the weak crackling of the North Yankton line he mutters that he needs to make more, and he can’t do it without Trevor. 

_I need you._

Inevitably, the doors snap shut, the hallways fill with people and Michael falls away to the nothingness he has laid in since March. 

It’s of course with the hard hand of gravity that Trevor wakes up in a bar, his head slipping out of his hands and smacking into the hardwood. He rises like leviathan from a wrathful and mythological sea with half-dimmed, tarry vision. Behind the ethanol based liquors and malts there is a state flag, and baseball artefacts; Boston, he figures. 

‘Fucking sellouts,’ Trevor mumbles, swallowing the brittle aftertaste of whatever was last in his mouth.

A barman stares at him with piggy eyes, ‘What will it be pal?’

To his left a man laughs heartily. 

‘Bourbon, now,’ he says and turns. ‘You, shut the fuck up before I jam my foot so far down your throat your bowels evacuate.’

A big square face, with absinthe green eyes and a broken nose looks at him. The man laughs again, his laugh comes right from the bottom of his lungs, one of those peeling, good-guy laughs.

‘You’re…’ the concept comes slowly to Trevor, because it hasn’t happened in a year or two. ‘And what the fuck are you laughing at?’

‘I don’t know,’ his got a loose accent and big oval hands on either side of his drink. Trevor stares at them hard as he moves them with every word. ‘Can’t say anyone’s ever told me to shut up more creatively. I appreciate the effort.’

‘Do you? Well sugar, you are really just going to love _the effort_ while I’m nine inches deep, boot an’ all,’ he growls, sliding his foot to the ground. 

The man doesn’t try to move out of Trevor's shadow, he holds his eyes and puts out a hand. 

Trevor frowns, his brain short-circuiting in the doubled flow of expectations and reality. He takes the hand, notes that it’s warm, and dry and that the man’s thumb hugs around his own tightly. 

‘Will Veder.’

‘Phillips.’

‘Phillip?’

‘Trevor.’

‘Oh, one of those last name-first name guys, huh?’

Trevor doesn’t answer, because his usually the first name-fake name kind of guy. He stares into Will’s green eyes as the barman tops up his drink. It only takes a flash of the white label and bold brown letters ( _The Mount_ ) in his periphery to make Trevor see his been backhanded by a pavlovian response. Discreetly he takes in the scent, tracking it north for a second. 

‘So, let me guess where you’re from.’

His eyes snap open, and his hands surge with a familiar heat. 

‘Far north?’ Will says, searching for his answer in his rapidly tightening features. Trevor looks away and throws down his drink. ‘That’s a yes… _eh_?’

His arm rips back and touches the glass down with such force it explodes on the floor. He rams his hand into the soft junction of Will’s throat and neck, watches his eyes roll white like dice. Will Veder arches back onto the stool, his back pinned to it until his long legs hang open obscenely. Trevor fills the gap between each thigh, stares into his eyes and feels a manic grin break the tired lines of his face. 

‘It doesn’t matter _where_ I’m from, because this is America — and you, my Bostonian friend, should fucking realise it means I can exercise my right to put you the fuck in your place,’ he feels the threads of violence pulling on his fist and shoulders; out of the nose-dive of withdrawal and into a level just as elevated. 

A choked, gurgling laugh breaks out from under his hand. Will Veder’s body trembles with another private joke. As he chuckles, a windfall of mid-tier whiskey and ghostly aftershave strike Trevor across the face; his resolve and grip loosen for the second time that night. He feels his chest stretch, ribs lengthen and crack before a ball of acid drops into his stomach and burns a hole through his gut. He squeezes the neck in his hand weakly, and shucks Will to the ground. Sloping up to the bar again, he feels like his been flung five years into the distant, impossible past.

‘Gimme another shot,’ he tells the barman hoarsely. 

‘Karma is a bitch, huh?’ next to him Will has climbed back onto his stool as well, rubbing his throat. 

‘Karma’s for cunts who expect things to just be handed to them on a silver-platter,’ Trevor answers. 

‘Karma's all you fucking get if you're already dead,’ Will shrugs, finishing his shot. 

He processes the riddle. It’s his turn to laugh, now, ‘What? Handsome, salt-of-the-earth, all-american asshole like you brained a guy or something?’

To his ever lasting surprise Will looks ahead nonchalantly and drinks again. They sit like that for a while, drinking, contemplating. Trevor feels taken in by the solace of having killed and found company in it outside of the usual suspect. He watches the barman wipe down the glasses and grab a broom, travel all the way round the other end and start sweeping. 

‘Handsome?’ Will finally asks, very quietly, very gruffly. 

Trevor smiles wolfishly, and knocks his glass against Will's. Hard. 

* * *

 Michael . November, 1995

‘Michael!’ Amanda’s voice carries through the kitchen and down the hall to where his on the edge of the couch that’s been with them since their first trailer. ‘Michael!’

_“…you know that name’s gotta be a mouthful when the ball get’s ah, get’s rolling — and I’ll tell you now Ted, it’s gonna get rolling pretty hard with-”_ ‘MICHAEL! GOD DAMMIT!’ _“—running the Boston Tailgaters…”_

From the corner of his eye Michael catches Tracey shooting into the room, before clambering onto the couch. Amanda follows with Jimmy on one hip and a dishtowel in the other hand. 

_“Now the Los Santos 69ners are another matter - different playing styles. You’re right there Archie his is going to be one hell of a clash—”_

‘Michael it’s thanksgiving, I just burnt my hand, if you wanna move your ass and help me with lunch I would appreciate it, so, so, so goddamn much,’ Amanda grits through her teeth. Tracey starts jumping on the couch next to him, asking when there will be a ‘down-touch’. 

‘Turkey's already dead Mandy, it ain't going anywhere,’ Michael glares at the 19 inches of TV intently, takes in the navy blue and bright green jerseys mingling. He feels Amanda glaring holes into him for a good minute. The ball bursts into play. He almost remembers what that's like, yelling an order and having it played through on the grass. Michael itches for a smoke as he sees himself flying down the field,  _knowing_ his path and the ball's would coincide perfectly. 

_“First play in the second quarter, Boston average down, 22.7 - and LS thereabout 8.1 - that’s not too bad, but -”_

‘Michael, LS will eat it, I’ll save you the next hour of your life. Now come help me carve that bird,’ she says after contemplating the play, which ends in a scrimmage sending refs hands under shoulder pads and helmets knocking in the pile. ‘I don’t even know why the hell you go for them.’

He glances at her, and frowns. Thinks back to the reports that have been saying the same thing all week. ‘Alright, alright, _why_ are they gonna eat it?’

‘Look —' she point at the play, where LS makes a short headway but is brutally taken down. ‘-it’s not rocket science, or any science. Good fullback, star QV equals strong offence, and reliable defence. Then what do the 69ners have? A good QV and predictable fullback, which equals a slapdash defence. Trace could tell you as much.’

On queue Tracey hops toward the screen, mashing it with her little fists and jumping the channel. 

Having ceremoniously rolled her eyes, Amanda goes back to the dining room. The sound of knives and forks clattering onto the table jolt Michael out of the sudden fugue state her prediction caused. 

_“…expect rain, rain, rain for the next half-week or so as this low pressure cell moves in!”_ Michael sighs gruffly, rubs a hand into his face remembering that Amanda’s old man used to coach so tough in Carcer City, that he’d killed a kid during practice. From what she'd told him late into the second year of their marriage, her dad had gone to court and lost a sizeable amount of his assets. Or at least enough that she’d spent junior and senior high in a back-shed trailer park. Thank God for small fucking favours or they wouldn't have shitty childhoods to base their parenting on, Michael thinks bitterly as he get's up to carve the bird; a learning curve bouncing of mistakes of the past generation.

He stretches his arms over his head and starts to herd Tracey toward the dining room by taking her hand of the TV and into his own. Michael skirts the thought that it might have just been him out there playing today. _Should_ have been. 

_“... robbery from the outskirts of the greater South Yankton North has left two dead, and only this footage from a 5/11 -”_

‘Oh fuck,’ Michael’s shoulders drop as hard as his gut, painful with apprehension as he watches the grainy footage being looped on the screen. 'Fuck.' 

‘Fuck!’ Tracey says cheerily, shooting out her arms to be picked up. 

‘What did I just hear?’ Amanda calls.

‘Daddy, what does _fuck_ m-mean?’ she asks, pulling on the leg of his house-jeans, and pointing a smudgy finger at the tv screen where Trevor skips a counter under a Pisswasser cap. The perfect semblance of everything going down a shit-hole in a 100 pixels or less. 

Deciding the meaning doesn’t matter, Tracey starts to repeat it, _‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…’_

Michael’s up and got his coat on before even thinking about socks; jamming his bare feet into the loafers Amanda got him for his birthday and swiping the wallet she’d gifted him for Christmas of the kitchen counter. 

‘Where the hell are you going? And congratulations by the way, you got her swearing before grade-school.’

‘I gotta go,’ is all he manage. ‘I gotta go. Now.’

Michael slams out the front door, the porch and the walkway into needle-thin rain, breath coming in white huffs. He turns on the spot like a headless chicken, before slipping into the silver E-Class parked out front - his Christmas present to himself. 

Once he hits the road, his hands go hard on the wheel, and his scream over top of _Wham!_ in full voice. He punches the wheel so hard his headlights blink on and off twice and the road swivels where he does not. It’s two miles to the nearest pay-phone; he clips three mailboxes and nearly misses a couple and their brown lab. By the time he side-wheels onto the walkway and gets out with just the hand-break down the rain has picked up. The keys dangle in the ignition. 

He shoulders into the booth, almost drops the receiver before dialling the number their triad of crime calls the “emergency line” both ironically and sincerely. 

‘Hello, Cluckin’ Bell NY, how may I help you?’ 

‘It’s me,’ he grouses, realising too late he didn’t wear gloves as his bare hand goes white with pressure on top of the silver phone set.

‘M, wasn’t ah - expecting you until after this festive season. The New Year,’ Lester’s voice starts light and goes hard, ‘our plan!’ 

‘It’s T! His finally let go of all his screws, just popped the last one and got caug—’

‘—on tape in South Yankton blowing off with almost five k — yeah, I am aware!’

‘Okay, okay so what? What are we gonna do - do I? What - do I need to get him out of the state - or-’

‘Lucky for you, his unwashed face is half hidden by that cap and has travelled east since. Hard to track him down in the cesspools he _dolphins_ between, but I spoke to him eventually. Our middle, troubled, wheel seems to have gotten better _and_ worse at this. He does lone takes in the north, but forks back to the south-east as soon as his done - routinely for little over a month now.’

‘And what about our fucking line of operation? His fucking accomplices in the north? Us? You realise L—’ Michael hesitate, throws a glance at the deserted Stall-Mart parking lot across the street and his open car door getting pelted, before he says the next thing. ‘—You realise this is as good as selling _us_ out? _His_ face, is my face is your fucking face. We’re a fuckin’ team.’

‘M - I hate to break your self-righteous, self-stroking sense of teamsmanship, but _listen_ \- you haven’t shown your _face_ since May, and work is by-product of regular involvement. I know all about your hook, line and fucking sinker with the Russian MJ ring in the west to bring in a little ah, supplemental income! So if you want to get angry because you haven’t fucked Trevor in six months - DO IT IN YOUR OWN FUCKING TIME!’ Lester dissolves into a wheezing cough, meanwhile Michael throws back his head and looks at the ceiling of the booth that’s been eaten through with black mould. A sharp intake of breath from an asthma puffer bursts through the receiver. 

‘Fine,’ Michael grits. ‘Tell me where he is, now.’

‘Gone south, you’ll find him in Boston. I caught him at a certain hotel twice, something high mid-range - four star place called the Circle Six. Something tells me he’ll be there again,’ Lester says. ‘If I hear from you again before New Years —’

‘—You’ll fucking hear from me, when I call you L,’ he cuts and rings off before Lester has another wheezing fit.

* * *

 A red-eye from North Yankton to Boston on Thanksgiving chokes down about two-fifty in cash, which is the sort of pocket change Michael digs out of the glove-box these days. He calls Amanda with the quarters that jangle at the bottom and tells her he won’t be home for dinner, he may not be home for the week. That she shouldn’t worry, he just has work to take care of. She rings of on him, because her parents are over and she has to grit out answers through a fake smile even though Michael told them he flicks used cars across the mid-west area. But luckily they’re the kind of folk that like him more for being away and bread-winning and all kinds of middle-classed bullshit Michael skipped on the way between the lower crust and becoming an American vulgarian.

At the airport he buys two pairs of socks, gloves, and a travel-size pack of Ambien to help the three hour flight; the hour layover in Chicago; and the last hour to Boston go down easier. He also forks out a little more, a wink and show of machismo at the gate to get put at a window seat so he’ll see less of the crusty-eyed business-men, nursing mothers and raw-faced college kids going home for the holiday season. 

Michael balls up and pushes down his seat during take off and thinks of a million ways to hook Trevor in the face for making him do this. As he watches NY disappear under a thin pillow of clouds he musters up the last take they planned and went through with; ending up with two dead bodies they’d never intended, compliments of Trevor Phillips, of course. Once the first air hostess can unbuckle, he orders a quart of whiskey and downs the Ambien right in front of her before handing back the empty mini-fridge bottle. 

With the heavy fog riding down his shoulders, he feels like the plane drops down and rolls him onto the runway before taking off the same way a car would after dumping a body. Around him a seething wind rucks up and forces him to put up his collar as dotted faces in the plane windows - Amanda, Tracey and Jimmy - wave at him energetically. Even as the metal bird takes off, Michael feels like the ground sinks; that the plane isn’t the one gaining altitude. He is losing it. 

At ground level the reeds on the sides of the runway have gotten long and wild, the concrete cracked with age and a few the hazard lights embedded into it flickering sickly yellow. In the flat, expansive distance a black car thunders down towards him and the reek of burnt tires fill and fogs the air by the time it donuts to a stop, the bumper scraping his knees.

Surreal and twisted, Trevor get’s out and slams the door shut, his eyes are burnt, white holes in his skull, cropped hair on end and a gun in his hand. Michael pats himself for a piece, but his unarmed. He pull up two fists against a pistol. 

'T, what the hell are you doing?’ he means to shout it, but his voice is tinny and thin.

He doesn’t answer. He charges into Michael at full throttle, taking him round the middle and tackling them to the ground together. Hands burning from grazes, Michael fights Trevor’s hard elbows pushing down on him. A gun dangling in between. But it’s too late, with a nimble finger Trevor locks and loads and the nose swims in the air for a few more seconds. The air shifts and to their left a plane makes itself known as private broadcast crackles in Michael ear - _ah we are DA086, preparing for a crosswind landing, but it seems that we gotta make a missed approach - ATC I repeat - a missed approach - everything we planned has gone to shit. It’s fucked - fucking fucked to high and holy-hell._ Michael’s head snaps flat to the side and watches a 707 beeline toward them. _Mayday, mayday, fuel shortage - disregard missed approach - we need to land now! NOW! NOW! NOW!_

‘—Mikey? We gotta move before this baby touches down — it’s gonna crush us,’ Trevor’s voice overtakes the roar. It’s raw and calm. It's a million twilights in a million hotels, a thousand truck stops and gas stations at dawn. 

In the time it’s taken the plane to manoeuvre so has the gun; now cocked in Michael’s hand and pressed into Trevor’s cheek. He blinks and the eyes staring into his are warm, and real and wet. 'God Mikey you drama-queen - shoot me or don’t, the engine will suck us in and shit us out! Do something!’

A bit of Trevor’s spittle lands on his forehead and the wind whips around them like they’re mid-tornado. The plane get’s closer and all he can do is stare at Trevor, his wild hair, sunken cheeks, and racoon-tired eyes asking — begging him to pull the trigger.

_‘This is your Captain speaking, we will be shortly landing at O’Hare at a balmy forty-eight - which is as good as you can hope for this time of year. Thank you for flying with FlyUS, and hope that you’ve had a pleasant trip.’_

Michael opens his eyes and unbuckles, so thoroughly soaked with sweat he leaves an imprint on the backrest. A kid on the isle seat in his row looks at him strangely. 

‘My Grampa is a bad flyer, but…sir, you take the fucking cake,’ he says in a good-natured midwest accent, like he doesn’t mean offence but needs to express his amazement. Some other day Michael would rough him up, but he just laughs shakily and rubs his damp hands together.

* * *

 Trevor

‘What do you do?’ 

Trevor tips the pipe away from his face. They’ve gone through the American dream, the potential of war and then every car they’ve ever had a good time driving. One has scorched through the trailer trash philosophy (Trevor) and the other suburban alcoholism and squalor (Will). All of which is moot — because they’ve fucked in the same hotel every third, or fifth day for the past month. 

So why they haven’t lit on the question occurs to Trevor as a misnomer while the meth inches under his skin. He laughs loudly enough to startle himself. ‘You know already, chief. I mean, I know you’ve been ramming your head into solid meat-walls for the last two decades, but you _know_.’

Still, Veder doesn’t look shame-faced or sheepish, on the contrary his face is still curious. He stands -well, lays by - for him to take a few more healthy puffs and go on, but Trevor loses words in the abstracting shapes looping in his head. His eyes slip shut, he burrows into the man’s neck and breaths in so deep his head is half methamphetamine and half _Mount_ whiskey, letting him see the planets align long enough to put Michael in his bed. 

‘You know it was an accident, really. But I still liked it,’ Will’s voice — its not a bad voice but it’s not _his_ voice. Trevor doesn’t bother looking at him, taking the interim to soak back into the tide of his daydream. ‘The way he sort of…crashed onto the ground, and stopped moving one limb at a time. His hands didn’t stop twitching until they brought the stretcher out. I just...liked it.’ 

‘Of course you did,’ Trevor mumbles, then shoots upright on the bed. Will keeps a calm recline, honest to God naked and sporting a resplendent semi. ‘Second-best feeling in the goddamn world. Nothing like putting your hand down and watching some shit-stain not come back up. A _real_ solution, to some _real_ fucking problems people can’t seem to handle without a judge and jury holding their hands and wiping their ass. The way I see it any free-enterprise worth doing is put up on this construct. EST, E-S-T isn’t a date, alright — it’s that first time the guy running things lays the law and _means_ it _._ ’ 

Will snorts, shaking his head. ‘You can just call it adrenaline.’

‘And then where the fuck is fun, huh?’ 

‘I thought the fun was killing part.’ 

‘Right, right, right! But then where’s the romance!’ 

‘So, let’s see - you rob people, and kill what’s left of them and you want romance in the mix?’ 

‘Bingo!’ but here lies the corner stone with which Trevor can’t reconcile this new toy of his. His a clear headed hedonist rushing along at full-throttle. He has a mean eye for details and eventualities, but no enjoyment of his own predilections. No sense of grandeur for it, and despite what he says, no _fun_ either, let alone romanticisation of the factoids. 

Trevor rolls his eyes.‘You’re a fucking boring piece of shit,’ he grouses after another minute, putting his pipe on the bedside after Will refuses his hundredth offer with a shake of the head. He doesn't smoke, he only drinks. ‘But lucky for me, you aren’t a boring fuck.’

Will Veder laughs. He seems to find it easy to do that, so easy and unforced it makes Trevor jumpy.

’Shut up,’ and he does it for him crushing by their mouths together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small disclaimer - prior to writing about this I didn't really know much about football (still am foggy on it so forgive any mistakes) but it was fun researching it. The names of the football teams are fictional, except for the 69'ers which is basically a GTA-esque pun for the heck of it.


	11. Descent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2/2

Michael

The balmy forty-eight drops to forty-five by the time he arrives in Boston. The ratty rental he hires over the counter has a broken radiator, and all the way into the inner city his gloves slip on the steering wheel. It’s nearing seven in the morning when he finally pulls up to a little diner for food, thinking he’ll be ready to eat a horse. When the waitress slides him his fried eggs, bacon and tomatoes his stomach lurches, a pitted feeling of dread sapping what little appetite he’d imagined. All breakfasts make him think of are Trevor; his endless appetite for waffles and pancakes and eggs. The millions of diners they frequented over the years. The door jangles with a waitress coming in late on her shift. Grey-brown coffee sits at his elbow expectantly, so he opts for forcing half of that down.

He moves on quickly. The hotel is ten miles away, with an outdoor carpark sparsely populated with mid-range models. Cutting the engine, and zipping up his jacket before he can think, Michael barrels toward the front door. The lobby is nicer than any of the places he and Trevor frequent between jobs. Carpet ten years from threadbare, thanksgiving decorations, deep wooded counters all feel like an affront to the very existence of Trevor. Or himself, if he pauses to consider it. There are a couple of bellhops, a few maids; some mid-tier business and salesmen they are looking after.

Suddenly, Michael feels out of place in his loafers and eight-dollar socks, patting down the jeans that are at least as clean as when he left home. He feels shot through with a renewed streak of fury that ebbed after his Ambein-whiskey flavoured dream.

He cuts a line to the desk clerk and leans in. ‘Hi, I was just wondering if I could get in touch with someone?’ 

‘I would be happy to pass a message along for you, sir,’ the clerk is a girl in her late twenties, her face drawn up under a tight ponytail and a wan smile stretching her lips. _Vanessa_ , her name shimmers on her badge. 

‘Ah no, no, no — I’d rather keep it a surprise,’ Michael clears his throat, putting his elbows in front of the registry. 

Her smile thins even more, lids dropping. Michael sees his opening close, and suspects it’s because his attempting a con with bags the side of half-baseballs under his eyes. You can’t charm your way out of looking like a lowlife if you’re dressed the part, he recalls. 

In any case Michael can take a hint, won’t stand begging at the counter, ‘You know what, sure. I’ll leave a message for my buddy.’

She nods, expectant. 

‘You know - might need a pen and paper, I want it word for word. Can you that for me at least, Vanessa? Can I call you that?’

The Clerk let’s out a long-suffering sigh, lifts up a pen and paper with great showmanship.

He clears his throat, ‘That’s to Trevor Phillips,’ he clears his throat again. ‘Fuck. You.’

Her eyes narrow and shoot up. 

‘You said I could leave a goddamn message. So give him that fucking message.’

* * *

 

While he ends up on the hood of his car, chain-smoking a pack to solve the problem (and hoping Trevor will just ride the lift down), Michael stops to consider who the fuck is Trevor Phillips anyway. Who is he to make him bust his balls in the cold and run across the country like a fucking idiot.

As far as Michael is concerned, he is a strike of lightening that just happens to keep striking _him_ of all people and places, repeatedly. No: that one grainy film of him won’t be a tail he can’t shake, but that isn’t the fucking point. _Escalation_ , Michael thinks as he chews on the inside of his lip, _is the fucking point_. He glances at his watch; back home the kids are awake now, forcing Amanda to ruck up some kind of breakfast; fried eggs for Tracey and scrambled for Jimmy, because it’s easier to sell it to him like that. 

Michael buries his face in his palms. What the hell is he doing in Boston, looking to—what? Warn? His meth-addled partner in crime? It doesn’t shake up, and he conveniently tries to forget the way they’ll wrap up on a narrow bed in some motel, drunk, after almost every job. Michael ignores that in coming to Boston he has acknowledged the country they’ve ran and pillaged for ten years; Colorado, Las Venturas, the north, south and both edges of the borders — in ratty crop-dusters, jacked cars and pick-ups. 

He rolls his shoulders forward, looking up; a kid in the bellhop uniform is watching him from across the lot.

It turns out that the rules that apply to a liquor store or a bank, also apply to a hotel: that if the front door isn’t an option you go in the back. The boy has crooked teeth, fidgety hands and after a little questioning Michael pats two-hundred into his breast pocket. He is shown to a dank, but large staff room in the basement to wait for answers. There are about two or three maids and porters milling about with their jackets and aprons discarded on a set of racks at the far end of the room. They smoke heavily, so the place is fogged up. At first Michael is weary that a concierge or clerk will come down and tell him in a nasal, bat-eyed way “staff only”, but everyone else seems too relaxed for that sort of shit to be happening regularly.

Michael bums two more Redwoods and wonders into the last stick-up they did in the mid-west. The blow-out wife-beater kind of fight the week had ended with. Which only led him to find Trevor in a crack den by the 25th of the month, a needle on the floor beside him, his eyes bleary with H, wearing nothing but white briefs and a _Grateful Dead_ t-shirt. Trevor had held his head in rough hands, muttering leaky apologies before burying his face in Michael's neck.

‘Mister ah- Michael?’ the boy comes to him wringing his hands. It reminds Michael of a young getaway driver they used two years ago. Alan? Alex? Whatever it was, Trevor had killed him by the end of it. 

‘Yeah,’ he stubs his cigarette into an overflowing ashtray beside him. ‘What’d you find?’ 

‘Floor 18, room 10 - 1810,’ he says, pride inching into his voice. Michael’s sight swims, suddenly reminded of the kid’s hands scratching at the back alley wall, tearing up his nails to bloody pulps while Trevor’s hands tightened on his thin neck. Alan, Alex had gone to talk - a crisis of conscience it seemed - but not before Trevor had taken care of it, _for us._

_‘_ Alright, thanks kid,’ he readies to go. 

‘Sir, excuse me.’

_He had gurgled so much Michael felt like he might have as well been screaming. What would his father think if he knew how he died? His mother?_

Michael looks back expectantly. 

‘You should take the stairs - there is no service lift.’

If - no - when, Trevor killed on a job these days he defaulted to thinking about parentage. He thinks about the way he held a two-minute old Jimmy, and how his son will be no different from those guys in twenty years. 

‘Okay, kid. Thanks,’ he says, voice rusted. 

The little maze of underground laundries, washrooms and kitchens join up to the stairwell for a quick get away, but standing in the dark square corridor it dawns on him that forty flights are hard on a 3-hour fever-dream and half a cup of coffee. Michael weighs his options, that either he climbs the fucking stairs, or he repeats this nightmare and gets home in nine hours. Empty handed. 

Michael starts upward, and his heart expands to every last inch of his chest, beating with such fury it wraps against the four-wall bones in his torso. On the twelfth floor he hits the landing more than he climbs onto it. He sits on the stairs and focuses on pushing air in and out. 

After a handful of loud breaths he hears whistling, descending between jaunty steps. The sound circles and sloshes around the concrete walls, growing higher in pitch and volume as it drains down. The owner of the tune finally reaches his floor.

‘Hey, what’s doing?’ 

Michael controls his breathing, trying not to sound like a punctured balloon. He turns to the guy towering over him. He isn’t a porter, he is just about the last fucking person on the planet he expects. 

‘Oh, hey man, just ah—taking a minute,’ Michael smirks, keeping it casual, all the while a loop of _now of all fucking times_ , runs through his head. After all, his looking right at the Tailgater’s QV like a kid perched on a step ladder. Or an old man bent in the throes of a heart-attack. 

‘Alright,’ Veder begins skeptically. He softly chuckles between sentences, ‘No worries, so long as you aren’t bustin’ an artery.’

Embarrassed heat floods to Michael’s cheeks. At least his already red in the fucking face, so it won’t make much difference. His at a loss for words, watching Veder go. 

Veder starts down again, but doesn’t resume whistling. 

‘Hey!’ Michael get’s up finally, and the QV turns around, now shorter than Michael by two stairs. He clears his throat with a little more authority. ’Aren’t you Will Veder, Tailgater QV?’

‘Yeah, I am,’ he nods, grinning toothily. His got a charming smile on him, white teeth. ‘Though that depends if you go for Boston.’

When Veder’s mouth opens it doesn’t tend to close to finish words; an accent embedded in the MA area Michael’s always known about but never really seen. It’s got the same effect as the slant of a cowboy’s tone where his nonchalance seems in-built.

‘Well,’ Michael puts up his hands, ‘Can’t lie — thought the 69ners had it.’

‘So did they,’ he shrugs. ‘But we put a lot of work in.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he agrees, ‘Sure, I used to play a little ball, but at the end of the day you can’t predict the game. Otherwise, why play, huh?’

‘Not wrong, but…’ he pauses, searching for a name. 

‘Michael,’ he says reluctantly.

‘—Mike, wasn’t it a whole different ballpark, literally, when _you_ were the one on the grass?’ he says smiling and squinting in an emphatic way. It occurs to Michael that this is how pro players talk when they visit kid’s hospitals and pro-bono bleachers; he resists the urge to snort, or take a swing at him. 

‘Yeah, sure, but you don’t have full control over your halfback or fullback, you can’t just _think_ my left tackle will hold and have it happen. No team is that coordinated,’ Michael presses on, resting a hand on the railing in case his temper does flare spectacularly.

‘Maybe so, Michael, but I _know_ my team, trust them. Difference between us and LS. Between winning and losing.’

He nods stiffly, his head starts pounding. The threat of anger and embarrassment converge to a boil in his chest until he feels sick. 

‘Well, you have a good day, Mike,’ Veder throws out an arm and catches him with a light pat at the elbow.

‘You too, man,’ he says staring after him for second. 

Veder turns around almost half a flight down, ‘Forgot to say, need me to sign anything for you?’ 

Michael exhales through his nose, his grip turning to stone on the bannister. ‘No, I don’t have a pen,’ he says gruffly. 

Veder nods, waves loosely, moves on.

* * *

Trevor

The bed is empty when he wakes up diagonal to the window, breaking across two fat pillows. His face flaky with spit, stuck to the sheet. Trevor stares at the ceiling a while, scratching his stomach idly before casting an eye out the window; rain. The radiator hums throatily on full blast five feet away.

A heavy rapping on the door introduces a beat, five, then ten knocks with the broad-side of the knuckle. His slick with sweat, and lolling naked on the bed trying to decide if he should let him in. _Him, him, him — who?_ Will? The cardboard cut-out who drinks the same whiskey and sneaks the same cigarettes as Michael? Or Michael? Who’d give his left tit to be Will? Trevor checks his pipe and finds it empty, a baggie on the floor beside it, also empty. 

By thirst, he calculates a day, or maybe half a day since his last high. 

He stumbles to his feet, ‘Alright, alright, alright!’ but controls the sparking lighter in his gut, so he won’t have to cut his losses if his wrong.

The peephole glints in the mid-afternoon light escaping the balcony curtains. Trevor ignores it. Why spoil the fun? Why not let the idea that on the other side of this door is the last person to look for him, linger. Why not let _Michael_ knock for another minute, just so he can go on and imagine him a foot away, leaning close…

Trevor closes his eyes, takes the door handle reverently, the cold press of the metal welcome in this stifling heat. He stands naked, half-dreaming as the door screams quietly against being inched open. Like sticking a knife under his fingernails and pushing down the pain starts as a tickle and rucks up to a fever-pitch of _feeling_ , waves and waves and waves of _feeling_ going over his head because of the mere possibility. For a moment it’s like he can materialise Michael by thinking about him hard enough. 

There is now a hand’s width in the opening, and Trevor peels his eyes open to it. Michael’s one grey eye looks back at him, bruised purple around the edges. His mouth drawn is into a thin line, patchy stubble on his cheek; all of him caught in the aborted light of the hallway. Trevor licks wets his lips. 

When he was five and living near a backwater creek, he used to skate on it in winter once it froze solid. But in the summer…in the summer, dressed in a thin tank and shorts he would steal his mother’s mason jars full of pickled onions and eat as many as he could, then dump the rest. Taking the jars, he would sit at the water’s edge for hours a-piece. Catching fireflies and gnats. With the jars lined up on a dead trunk he’d fall asleep to their popping lights, and wake up to them suffocated.

As the seconds transpose between them through the crack in the door, Trevor tries to see how he can shove this minute into a mason jar and fall asleep to it until the morning, because it can’t be _fucking real._

'Trev, what the fuck is going on?’ 

Trevor slams the door open. He can’t seem to stop laughing for the life of him. He falls forward with hands balanced on his knees before he can stop. 

’T, I asked you a fucking question,’ Michael shuts the door behind him and matches Trevor’s five steps back with three, pointing at the ground with an index finger. ‘So, how ‘bout you answer.’

‘Mikey, please…take a load off, have a beer, rub your feet out on the welcome matt before getting feisty,’ he waves around, pretending clear off the beer bottles at the foot of the bed. He experimentally rolls a couple to the side of the room. The clunk against the walls, dripping on the carpet. ‘How you been, how are those kiddies, the wife?’ 

‘Maybe I’ll fucking start for you — let’s see, you start being sloppy and lone-wolfing it in North Yankton, and you fuck off here to get away? Meanwhile I’m sitting around waiting for the next job not knowing there might be goddamn cops on me? Got an answer to that, asshole?’ 

Trevor rolls his eyes, stretches his arms over his head. Slowly, he pulls down a pair of boxers two sizes too big from the bedpost before wearing it. ‘Look, look, look, it was just one, _small, insignificant_ job — you know, I have civil responsibilities,’ he pulls up a hand with flourish, starts counting on his fingers, ‘Bailouts and highway tolls, groceries and gas bills, not to mention a steady drug habit, drink habit, and the girls, _you_ know all about that — it adds up, Michael.’ 

‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the _fuck_ up! I nearly went out of my mind trying to get here to you in this ivory fuckin’ tower. Trying to save myself and Lester, and what we took ten years; skin off our backs and blood on our hands to build! So you can laugh at me? I don’t fucking think so! LOOK AT ME!’ Michael shouts until his voice is pitched-out and a vein in his neck is bulging. His eyes have feverish red ringing the blue-grey. Trevor swallows hard, he had missed the way Michael’s eyes flash grey when his angry. The way his shoulders hunch, his fists curled. 

Suddenly, Trevor can’t _stop_ looking at him. He drinks him in. Michael’s pallid face; the arch of his eyebrows — but it comes up short, because Trevor feels five hundred times more lived-in. He _feels_ like his bones are grating against each other, cartilage rubbed out, and his skull searing through his scalp. Trevor feels that every inch of his skin has rotted, that his veins hang so close to the skin he has become translucent. And Michael, though haggard, is beautiful. Light skin, dark hair and sharp eyes. 

‘No,’ he opens his mouth to taste shit, nothing but shit in the damp air. Trevor looks at Michael’s forehead beading with sweat and says, fuck you, Michael. _Fuck you._

‘You have been gone for years! You have been gone for months, and decades. You have been gone, for as long as I have been _alive!_ You don’t exist now, tucked into that house with your phoney wife, her phoney tits and your fucking kids playing happy families. Your white fence and lawns and window washers! You melted your guns Mikey, and put me at the bottom of the same barrel while I waited! I waited! Six months? Six months - one-hundred and ninety-four days I’ve been digging for you, calling and waiting and _calling and waiting_. Maybe he’ll call back today, and then tomorrow and then EVERY FUCKING DAY I WAITED.’

Long after he runs out of breath and get’s it back a silence starts to ring out. 

’Trevor,’ Michael voice keels, his hands open. ‘I…’

‘You what?’ Trevor loses voice, its too fucking hot, the walls too close, the floor too soft.

‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ he says with finality, like it’s all the words left in him. His eyes are sure and steady again. 

‘Well not by me, Mikey,’ Trevor hisses, pulling at his hair and going limp. His goddamn tired, his so tired he puts himself in the bed they shared for two months on the west coast seven years ago, and shut his eyes. Remembering the salty breeze on the morning air, waking up and falling asleep in Michael’s shadow. 

‘I’m sorry,’ Michael says quietly. 

Trevor paces for a second, and slumps on the bed facing toward the window. He shuts his eyes again and swims out from a pool, breaking the water to storm-charged air. All of his memories spark at once like live-wire. 

‘I love you, Mikey, I really, goddamn fucking do.’ 

‘What the fuck am I meant to do about that?’ Michael clips the end of his sentence, voice rolling out coarsely.

Trevor sucks in a breath, his chest caving. He opens his eyes and watches the city behind the water-stained glass. A cold, ringing reality boxes his ears. He feels sweat roll down his chest, ripple down his back. 

There is a click at the door and a matte flood of grey-blue light. Trevor remembers Will with a jolt, but he doesn’t turn to look at him for a long minute. 

_What the fuck am I meant to do about that?_

* * *

 Michael 

‘Hey, you got a…message.’

Outside the context of stairs, Michael is three inches shorter than Will Veder.

Trevor keeps looking out the window his arms slumped into his lap, ‘Read the message, Will.’

Michael watches Will look at him with his mouth slightly ajar, before sliding his eyes to Trevor again. 

‘Yeah, Will,’ Michael echoes hollowly. ‘Read the message.’

Will’s eyes lock back onto his, but this time Michael looks away by turning on the spot. Trevor’s ratty duffel he got him four birthdays ago is stuck in a corner chair, a roll of condoms are hanging out the front pocket. There are beer bottles, cigarette packets and empty baggies scattered across the floor. A tray with _Mount_ whiskey and granite ice are the centrepiece of the mayhem, caught by the nascent light on the bedside. Trevor’s got tears on his face still staring out the window. He looks small and lost, thin-shouldered and used.

Michael turns back slowly.

‘It says “ _Fuck you_ ”,’ Will answers to his face, crumbling up the paper. ‘Now, what the hell is he doing in here, Trev?’ 

The anger that had begun to curl in Michael’s gut the second he had left home springboards. He tackles him with a roar; everything muddies. He shouts, and shouts and flies at Will Veder, Tailgater No. 2 with both his fists. Michael’s hands in front of him come up bloody every time they hook in, he pounds and kicks and snatches at Veder’s scruff before nailing him into a doorjamb all the while his arms flail pathetically. When he shoves him back-first onto the floor Will gurgles something. His mossy eyes stare back in horror, too shocked to fight. He bunches his collar into his hands and bounces Will’s head agains the door. _Fuck you_ , he means to yell, but his silent when Veder crumbles to the floor. 

Michael looks at the man's limp form, blood all down his front, eyes bulged shut. In a fugue state he looks back at Trevor. He has been spectating; eyes shine wetly, caught on Michael’s blood-freckled face. For the first time in ten years Michael understands.

He stares down at his bloodied hands and realises _this_ , the blood, the anger, the listlessness, is love. And while Trevor's love keeps throwing him to Michael's feet, his own love demands Trevor stay there: bowed into a mould Michael designated for him the day they met. 

* * *

Stairs are easier to climb down than up. Trevor trembles hard in the frigid cold after the heat, the rain pelting them hard. Michael steeps on the gas. He rips away into the first highway he sees after they leave the inner-city. His knuckles are lanced pink-red, but browning with Will Veder’s blood.

Michael glances at Trevor twice in a three hours ride and both times he sits grey-faced with a ghost of a smile on his face. They don’t talk until their first stop after midnight. It has finally stopped raining, the concrete gleams. Michael parks jaggedly in a motel and stares straight ahead in a daze. 

‘The room was in my name,’ Trevor tells him after a yawn. ‘He had a _reputation,_ had to maintain certain _associations._ ’

Michael nods numbly. He follows one foot in front of the other to the motel front lobby, but there isn’t anyone to greet them. As Trevor slides behind the counter and looks for keys that match up to the empty register Michael stares outside. A green, neon light beats down on his face, _Vacancy._ All his thoughts are white noise, and the green V burns into his retinas’ short term memory. 

When they get upstairs, Trevor rolls Michael’s jacket of his shoulders, pushes him onto the bed, pulls of his shoes. He then does the same for himself. On his knees between Michael’s, he kisses his knuckles gently.  A jolt of static electricity charged on the peeling carpet wakes him up to Trevor’s lips on his hand. The unreality breaks. Those hazel eyes come into focus under slipshod brows. 

Yes; he left his family mid-thanksgiving, he called Lester, and while being dotted in on the game between the Tailgaters and 69ners his feet got him to the place where he eventually beat up Will Veder to an inch of his life. Like gravity, like the warmth of Trevor’s lips, it pulls him of the runway his been stuck on all along. The plane flies over their heads and lands safely for now.

Michael feels his body come alive, alighting from where his hands are connected to Trevor’s. Too exhausted to think, to examine or question, he pulls Trevor in close and up the bed to lie beside him. 

He sleeps long and hard, and dreams of forgetting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment, and let me know what you thought!


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